First full time job at Fubra
At university I still kept in touch with Paul and Brendan who had set up www.fubra.com. They came up to Nottingham a couple of times to experience student life.
In my first year at Nottingham I had emailed Paul suggesting I should drop out of university and join Fubra. I am pretty sure he did not want that responsibility on his shoulders as he told me to stick at it until Fubra was doing better.
With no graduate career lined up in my final year, I arranged to start at Fubra as soon as I returned home from university in June 2003. At this time Fubra was beginning to really prosper and had a team of 6 full time employees, 2 summer students and 2 students from Holland on a placement year. It felt like a proper company. I was appointed their Technical Innovation Manager or TIM for short.
It was at Fubra that I learned how to program in PHP (the same programming language that Clear Books is written in).
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
Working hard to get a 2:1
By the end of my second year at University I was averaging 53.5% in my degree. In the beginning of my third year, as I started looking at careers, I quickly realised that I would need to average at least 60% to even get a look in at the investment bank graduate schemes I was interested in. It seemed every company required a minimum of a 2:1 before they would even interview you. Due to the weighting of modules in my final year I needed to average 64% in my final year exams.
Skipped lectures, missed tutorials and money making schemes did not seem so clever now. I made the decision to stop applying for jobs and focus on my degree. If I pulled it off I would apply for graduate jobs after university.
I began going to all my lectures, working in the library after tutorials and studying during the holidays. My final year was very much about hard work and it paid off.
In the end my final year mark was 69% bringing my overall average to 64%.
I had done it with a little room to spare.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
It could be you
A professor at university convinced me of the merits of playing the National Lottery during a Game Theory lecture. The probability of choosing the winning combination and landing the jackpot is miniscule, however, the argument ran that if £1 per week does not impact your standard of living i.e. you will not miss £1 per week down the back of the sofa, then play the National Lottery to give yourself that slim chance of the big win. From time to time you will win a tenner or fifty pounds which will offset some of those lost pound coins.
I play by direct debit so that I do not have to remember to buy a ticket each week or even to check if I have won. It’s all automatic. I have not won more than £90, but nor am I missing that £1 each week and one day it could be me.
The same principle applies to premium bonds where the top prize is £1 million. Buy at least one premium bond for £100 to give yourself a chance of scooping the top prize. Plus with premium bonds you are entitled to your original investment back at any time.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
Scheming at university
At university I found myself exploring ways to make money from short term opportunities.
Failed investment
I did not know the first thing about valuing companies or investing in them when I was at university. When my friend (another Tim) and I were looking through the business pages one weekend and saw that Eidos shares had hit a 52 week high of £4.00 but were now trading at £1.80, we were convinced that a chunk of our student loan would be well spent on Eidos shares. The share price would go back up and we would double our money as Eidos had the popular game Tomb Raider starring Lara Croft.
This was my first investment lesson. A company’s past performance is no guide to its future. The share price actually drifted lower until we eventually cut our losses.
£50 per referral
I had to sign up to an online stock broker, Comdirect (now Selftrade), to buy my shares in Eidos. As it happened, they had a promotional offer on at the time: If you referred a friend to the service, and that friend signed up and placed a trade, then both you and your friends' accounts would be credited with £50.
If I could get my housemates, university friends and course mates to all sign up, I could make £50 a pop. I had to persuade my referrals that as long as they placed one trade and bought a penny share then the cost to them would be the £12.50 trading fee plus the 1p penny share. From their £50 sign up bonus they could make a guaranteed £36.49 and could then go on to male their own referrals. It was a win-win for everybody.
The guaranteed bet
One of my housemates was a social gambler: fruit machines in the pub, the odd footy match prediction at the weekend, and then he stumbled upon online gambling. It was great for him as he did not have to leave the house to make his occasional “cheeky bet”.
It turned out that all the major betting websites were offering similar deals in which they would match your deposit of up to £50 if you bet the entire deposit. To me this was another guaranteed money earner.
If I deposited £50 and bet half on one snooker player winning and the other half on his opponent winning then I would get back my original £50 from the sign up offer and also my winnings from whichever snooker player won. A guaranteed profit. I did this on every gambling website I could find and even set up a second credit card registered at my university address so I could do some of them a second time.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
New information paradigms
I had a long summer ahead of me before the late September start at the University of Nottingham. There was no way I was going to spend it collecting trolleys at Sainsbury’s. I wanted a proper job. I thought about going to work with Paul and Brendan at Fubra, but they were not in a position to pay a salary and I needed to save up some money for university.
I picked up the Local Thompson business directory and took down the details of computing companies in my home village, Crowthorne. I drafted a CV and posted it to the seven or so companies I found.
A company called New Information Paradigms replied and invited me to their office for an interview. They offered me a job for the summer and I ended up returning to work for them for all of my Easter and summer holidays for the next three years. The initiative I showed started their student placement scheme.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
University of Oxford reject
I was unsure what I wanted to do after university so I settled on mathematics as a degree choice. I figured I was ok at maths and it was a subject that had a broad application base. I applied to Oxford, Nottingham, Warwick, Imperial College and Southampton.
Oxford involved taking an exam and a 1 on 1 interview with a professor. The exam went well as it afforded me not one but three interviews with different professors at different colleges. That said I was rejected by all three. I suspect my interviewing skills and the inability to comprehend the fourth dimension of a cube were my failings.
With Oxford out of the picture, London too expensive and Southampton my wildcard, I was left with a choice between Warwick (and another entrance exam) or Nottingham and its rumoured high girl to boy ratio.
The ratio won.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
Business ideas come from satisfying a need
Businesses often spring up to satisfy a need. Mum’s theatre school needed an application to manage the classes, registers, pupils and invoicing and I needed a project for my A Level computing coursework. I ended up creating a theatre school database and sold it to mum and her business partner. Mum used it for more than 10 years until she retired. The new owners of the school are still using the program.
I contemplated turning the idea into a business which required packaging the application up as a stand alone product and selling it online to other dance schools. Later on I would explore this idea further, however, a new adventure soon took over my life, university.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
Meeting future business partners at sixth form college
I have always worked. Before I moved to Ghana I had a paper round and when I came back to the UK in the summer before sixth form college I immediately started working on a local farm. I was 16 and getting paid £2.50 per hour.
Thursday evenings after college and a Saturday shift at Sainsbury’s soon became my regular part time job. The money was slightly better than the farm and I managed to save up for my first car, a second hand VW Polo.
I knew practically no one when I joined Farnborough Sixth Form College as I had just returned to the UK from Ghana. However, it was at Farnborough that I met Paul Maunders in my mathematics and computing classes and by-the-by Brendan McLoughlin too.
Brendan had set up a company called Fubra which was going to sell Italian domain names online (the website exists to this day, LiveToDot). He succeeded in persuading Paul and a couple of others to join his company instead of going to university. Although invited to join them, I was looking forward to the adventure of moving away from home.
While I took the boring academic route, these two entrepreneurs went on to turn Fubra into an established and successful online media company and our paths would cross again in the future.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
Programming a computer catalogue
My brother and I used to order games from a UK shareware catalogue and have them sent over to Ghana. It would take weeks for the now antique floppy disks to arrive.
I had an idea that, using the programming language BASIC, I could develop a program to list the games we had bought, hand out my program to friends at school, and sell them copies of our games.
I developed the program but the venture never took off.
After nearly five years we left Ghana to return to the UK, but the ability to program software was an invaluable skill a Ghanaian school friend, Osei Poku, taught me. It was pretty cool to be able to play Guns ‘n Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine and edit the code to change the speed - at least to a 15 year old.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
Slow starter at Ghanaian secondary school
When I was 12 dad’s work as an infrastructure planner took the whole family to Ghana for four and a half years. One day it was mentioned that the move was a possibility and then all of a sudden we found ourselves hit by a wall of heat as we got off the BA plane at Kotoko International Airport in Accra. It was hot. I can only ever remember wearing shorts in Ghana from that day onwards.
Mum always assured the family that it would be a fantastic experience. At the time living in Ghana became the normal way of life for me, although on reflection she was right.
Entry into Ghana International School required an English and a mathematics exam. I was to find out that the school loved putting students through exams and I did not get off to the best start. Although I achieved more than 70% in the English exam, I got less than 40% in mathematics.
The low mark ensured my first weeks at school were spent staying late for remedial mathematics classes, however, just like building up towers of coins was a competition, so was school. I ended up doing ok at school because I was determined to do better than my classmates - it was another competition.
Despite my poor start in mathematics and those initial remedial classes I was invited by the school to take my mathematics GCE O Level a year early. I got an A.
(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim's personal blog on startups & small businesses)
