Dear OE Member,

I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone by! As the sabbatical President of Oxford Entrepreneurs it has been a privilege to work with, what I consider to be the most dynamic and talented committee at Oxford to take the society from strength to strength. A lot of effort goes into running the society and the committee from 05/06 and 06/07, both of which I have had the pleasure of working with, have been outstanding. It is their hard work which has led to our membership nearly doubling; a 100% increase in the number of events hosted, and a 300% increase in entries to our flagship competition – Idea Idol. It has also been a headline hitting year with OE receiving coverage in CNN, ITV News, the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, BBC Radio, the Daily Telegraph, as well as numerous local media outlets. I wanted to briefly outline some of the highlights of this year.

Idea Idol & Varsity Pitch

Without a doubt the biggest highlight of the year has been Idea Idol & Varsity Pitch. Over £10,000 was given away, together with a trip to Monaco, so it is no wonder that we were overwhelmed with applications! Both events were packed with students and the enthusiasm of the participants was fantastic. The event also involved filming our first ever Oxford Entrepreneurs commercial (for Varsity Pitch) which can be seen online at www.varsitypitch.com – thanks to allthose who took part and to Hiroki Takeuchi (Vice-President 06/07) for all his hard work.

Congratulations to Matoke Matoke, Design the Time & Camerge for their success. In a surprise turn of events we were delighted by the announcement by two judges from Idea Idol - Shaa Wasmund and Dan Wagner from Brightstation Ventures that Brightstation Ventures would be funding Design the Time, and we will be closely following the progress of their venture (which I have been told is launching under a new name – to be announced soon!)

Start a Company

This year marked the launch of our new Start a Company scheme which helped to bring together budding entrepreneurs eager to form teams and start new ventures. We have taken on board the feedback received from this year’s scheme and will be working to develop it further to provide more support and events. We would definitely value your input in this, so if you have ideas about how we can help you more then please email Jeremy Moses

Alumni event

We were delighted to be able to host our first ever Alumni Event in London at the 3i Offices. This was a fantastic event with Martha Lane Fox (Co-Founder of Lastminute.com & Oxford alumni) as the keynote speaker. We are keen to engage more with alumni and host more events like this in the future. If you have any suggestions for good Alumni speakers/ways of involving alumni please contact Max Kirby

And in the pipeline…

Over the summer we will be reviewing our External Membership policy. This year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of people applying to join the society from outside the University community. This is fantastic as it enables experienced entrepreneurs, local business people and interested parties to take part in our events and enrich our membership, however we will be working to review our current External Membership and asking people to renew their membership requests. We hope to be able to gather more data about our members to ensure we can facilitate more meaningful interaction and ensure all members are as active as possible within the society. If you have any comments about our membership policy please contact Ting Chen. We will also be adding more resources and features to our website over the summer, so keep an eye out on this website for the new developments!

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to the entrepreneurs and experts who gave their time to speak at our events this year. These include: Peter Jones (Dragons Den), Theo Paphitis (Dragons Den), Martha Lane Fox (Lastminute.com), Michael Birch (Bebo.com), Shaa Wasmund & Dan Wagner (Brightstation Ventures), Ian Livingstone (Eidos), Jim Lawn (Microsoft), Bronwyn Kundhardt (Microsoft), Katherine Mathieson (NESTA), Ian Lobley (3i), Brad Rosser (Inside Track), Jamie Murray-Wells (glassesdirect), Alex Tew (milliondollarhomepage.com), Darius Norrell (Real World Magazine), Charlie Osmond (Freshminds), Cally Robson (ideas-into-action), Kulveer & Harjeet Taggar (Boso.com) and all the other workshop leaders/facilitators who have helped us out.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors and supporters without whom none of this would have been possible. They include: 3i, Oxford Science Enterprise Centre, Deutsche Bank, Sleepwell Hotels, Microsoft, NESTA, Business Link, Innocent Smoothies, Cobra Beer, Red Bull, Make Your Mark (in association with MTV & Fopp), Severn Internet, Purple Media, MindBench, Equity Fingerprint, Polecat, and Cherwell. In particular I would like to thank Fiona Reid (our Senior Member) for her ongoing advice and unfaltering support of OE and Jasmin Levy at OxSEC for all her help with running our events at the Business School.

Lastly, it gives me great pleasure to introduce my successor: Alasdair Bell who will be taking over as sabbatical President from me and will be supported by Andy Young (Vice President). Both Alasdair and Andy are experienced members of the Committee and I have no doubt that they will do a great job in leading the team next year. We have a great year to look forward to which will include a bigger Idea Idol, more great speakers and an improved Start a Company Scheme.

If anyone has any comments/feedback about the year please do not hesitate to email me directly at rajeeb.dey@jesus.ox.ac.uk. I wish next year’s committee the very best and look forward to the continued success of Oxford Entrepreneurs.

Have an awesome summer, and for those graduating, good luck with your entrepreneurial ventures!

Raj