2020 vision: tomorrow’s stars

Edie Lush

Who will be the rising stars of the business world by the end of the next decade? We set out to find the Richard Bransons and Charles Dunstones of the next generation – under-25s who already have a track record of business start-ups and social entrepreneurship. Edie Lush talks to ten of them

David Langer and Andy Young, both 23, co-founders of Groupspaces.com

Langer and Young are the co-founders of GroupSpaces.com, an Oxford-based internet company aiming to organise the world’s online groups. In January 2008, GroupSpaces raised six-figure funding; in April the company was selected for WebMission as one of 20 promising UK web startups, traveling to Silicon Valley and backed by HSBC, BT, TechCrunch and UKTI. To date, GroupSpaces has attracted over 100,000 beta testers in the UK student market and 70 blue-chip advertisers. Langer was awarded second place in the 2007 UK Graduate of the Year competition for his achievements while studying maths at Oxford. As well as founding GroupSpaces, these included playing multiple university sports, presiding at two university societies and winning work placements at McKinsey, JPMorgan and Lehman Brothers. Young is currently on sabbatical from his scholarship in computer science at Oxford, which he took after the company raised funding. He was selected for IBM’s EMEA Best Student Recognition Event in 2007 and has been designated one of Freshminds’ ‘Ones to Watch’.

Nick Bell, 24, co-founder of QuickTV

Nick Bell has already set up and exited four businesses, ranging from video conferencing to spray tanning. His most lucrative sale thus far is teenfront.com, the online magazine he founded at 14 and sold for nearly £1 million the day after he sat his last GSCE exam. After completing the sale, Bell initially chose to continue with his school education. He had an office of 20 people located 20 metres from the school gates, but after six months of asking to be excused from class to lead a conference call or talk to his finance director, he decided to devote himself to business full-time. His most recent venture, QuickTV, is a technology start-up providing companies with the ability to add interactive features to online video content. Bell has raised £1 million in funding from a combination of angel and venture capital sources, and he hopes to raise between £5 million and £10 million next year to drive aggressive growth plans, which include targeting the US. Bell is a regular speaker for Young Enterprise and often helps out with entrepreneurial courses at the University of Newcastle. He feels that although there has recently been a significant investment to promote entrepreneurship in schools, there is still much to be done. The key issue is that young people frequently struggle to have their business ideas taken seriously by mainstream education. The commercial world will take a 15-year-old seriously if their ideas are good enough, so it’s time that the education system did too.