Age: 23

Occupation: Internet Entrepreneur.

David is the CEO and co-founder of GroupSpaces, an Internet company revolutionising the way clubs and societies manage mailing lists, membership databases, file sharing, websites and events.

Having graduated with a degree in Pure & Applied Mathematics in 2007, David was awarded 2nd place in the UK Graduate of the Year competition for achievements throughout his student career. In addition to setting up GroupSpaces, these included receiving the Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award, an Explorer Award for conservation work from the John Muir Trust and being selected as one of FreshMinds’ Ones to Watch for the future.

Prior to working full-time as an Internet Entrepreneur, David worked in Investment Management at Lehman Brothers, Complex Derivatives Trading at JPMorgan and completed the Discover course with McKinsey & Company.

In addition to spending much of his time organising the world’s groups with GroupSpaces, David is currently an Ambassador for the Make Your Mark scheme, the Entrepreneurship Columnist for national student newspaper The Gateway and he writes blog Freed From The Matrix about young entrepreneurs.

David is also a very keen sportsman. Since playing in the England table tennis squad as a junior, he played several sports for St. Anne’s College and was also President of Oxford University’s Table Tennis and Motor Drivers’ Clubs. He is currently training for his latest pursuit of triathlon.

You can follow David on Twitter at http://twitter.com/langer

Age: 23

Occupation: Internet Entrepreneur

Andy joined the Oxford Entrepreneurs team in spring 2006 and became Vice President in April 2007. In November 2007 he deferred studies for his degree in Computer Science in order to work full-time on the company he co-founded in February 2006, developing GroupSpaces.com – an online service for clubs and societies.

Andy has spent recent years developing to become an experienced web developer and internet entrepreneur. Given his first computer aged 7, he turned it on to be presented with nothing but a blinking cursor – this was 1992. Forced to learn to program it in order to create his own games, he grew up alongside the rise of the personal computer and was bugging his parents to let him connect his computer to online services via the telephone years before the Internet came along. By age 16 he had already created several accounting and database programs for his parents and family friends, and soon discovered building websites for local businesses to be far more lucrative than working as a waiter in the local hotel.

Before coming to Oxford, Andy had already latched onto the idea that creating something once in order to sell it repeatedly was better business than being paid by the hour, not to mention the discovery that working for himself could be far more challenging and rewarding. It was therefore natural that he joined OE. Having been inspired by talks from Sir Alan Sugar and Brent Hoberman he joined the committee in spring 2006.

Andy spent 2 years working for a web design agency where his work spanned development, project management and consultancy in e-commerce, real estate and the public sector. He was responsible for the online marketing and e-commerce strategy at WearFair, an Oxford-based company retailing fair trade jewellery imported from Chile, and built ClickUni.com – the Homepage for Students. He holds a Certificate of Higher Education in Music and Sound Recording from the University of Surrey and won a scholarship from St John’s College, Oxford for academic achievement in the first year of his degree.

In the immediate future, Andy’s plans are to build GroupSpaces into a successful web service used by millions of people, which should see the necessity to grow the team and future rounds of investment funding. Always ready for a challenge, for Andy these are exciting times..

Watch Andy and ClickUni co-founder David Langer interviewed on Silicon Valley video blog LunchMeet

Andy is happy to be contacted at andy@groupspaces.com

Age: 20

Occupation: Student / Founder of ESSA
www.studentvoice.co.uk

Rajeeb Dey is the Founder and National Co-ordinator of the English Secondary Students’ Association (ESSA), Co-Founder of Enternships™ and is an undergraduate reading reading Economics & Management at Jesus College, Oxford.

Profile of ESSA:

• ESSA is working to become the representative body for secondary students aged 11-19 in England.
• It provides training, guidance and advice to empower students and equip them with vital skills needed in becoming actively involved in the decision-making processes in their school communities.
• ESSA works in partnership with other organisations to bring the views of schools students to the attention of local and national policy-makers in relation to educational issues.
• ESSA undertakes consultations and projects for organisations such as the General Teaching Council (GTC), Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA).
• ESSA is developing a school membership package to be launched in September 2006.

Personal profile

Rajeeb (Raj) began work on developing ESSA in November 2003 alongside doing his A-levels. He first came up with the idea after hearing about secondary student unions in other European countries and thought to himself – “if they have one, why don’t we?” and since then Raj has been able to generate widespread support for ESSA. ESSA now employs two full time members of staff and has offices in London Bridge.

Raj is not new to youth politics and young people’s participation issues; he was the figurehead of Chelmsford Borough Council’s “No Vote…No Voice” Campaign – to promote young people to vote in the local elections and Vice-Chair Finance of the Chelmsford Youth Council. His work with the Youth Council led to him winning the DfES Exceptional Community Champion 2005 Award and being a Finalist in the Windrush Achievement Awards in 2004. Raj is currently a Co-optee on the Trustees Board of the Carnegie UK Trust, as well as a Trustee of the Phoenix Education Trust. Raj was also awarded a Young Leaders Award from the Royal Society of Arts and a Wavemakers Award by Sir John Major.

Problems he’s had and how he’s overcome them

Establishing ESSA whilst doing A-levels. It was his final year of A-levels when things really started to get going, but he didn’t let it get in the way of developing ESSA. It meant that Raj had to plan his time very effectively to ensure that he did enough work to secure good grades (to get into Oxford), whilst also doing the ground work to set up ESSA.

Major successes

• Launching at a the Trades Union Congress Centre on 4th February 2005 with the support of major education union leaders and the Minister for School Standards’ support (Stephen Twigg MP), who said that: “ESSA is good news, not only for pupils but for teachers and all those who work in education – including Government. Through ESSA, I look forward to seeing more pupils taking part in decision making in their schools and also bringing their views to all those who are making policy locally and nationally. I’m sure they will make a huge and valuable contribution.”
• Securing a government funded contract to produce a national training programme for students called Confidence in Communication
• Receiving an award from UnLTD – the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs
• Winning Channel 4 and NESTA’s “Bedroom Britain Campaign” (an award recognising the young entrepreneurial talent in Britain), which involved national television exposure for ESSA
• Employing two members of staff and moving into plush new offices in London Bridge!

What I love about (social) entrepreneurship

The ability to make a positive impact on society is what Raj enjoys in being a social entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship gives you flexibility, and the freedom to do your own thing; and social enterprise in particular gives you the added satisfaction of knowing that you are influencing change for the better.

Other projects Raj is working on

Raj is Co-Founder of Enternships™ which connects the most ambitious and talented students with the best entrepreneurial internships being offered worldwide. All placements are in fast-growing companies and start-ups, and with successful entrepreneurs. Enternships won a national award from the Royal Society of Arts this year. If you or your company qualify and can offer an Enternship, or you would like to apply for an enternship, get in touch or visit www.enternships.com.

Consultancy services

Raj has acted as a freelance consultant on various issues such as Youth Engagement/Participation, Marketing, Enterprise and Graduate Recruitment and has advised clients including the Department for Education and Skills, Royal Society of Arts/T-Mobile, Lehman Brothers, Britvic and Enterprise Insight.

rajeeb@studentvoice.co.uk

Age: 22

Occupation: Internet Entrepreneur

Kirill graduated two years ago with a double first in a Mathematics BA from St. Johns. He was the first External Relations Officer and third President of OE. Since leaving Oxford, Kirill managed data and analytics at Slide.com, and in 2007 co-founded YouNoodle.com.
Some more information on Slide and YouNoodle are below. His other previous projects include AmIWorthit.com and Enternships.com.

Kirill welcomes contact from anyone interested in starting or helping early-stage companies. You can read his full bio and get in touch with him by following the link below:
http://www.makharinsky.com

YouNoodle

YouNoodle helps you discover and get involved with the hottest early-stage companies. It also provides business competition, event, networking and mailing list functionality for real-world groups that support startup communities, as well as building technology for investors to help inform their decisions. YouNoodle raised funding from some of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel, The Founders Fund and Max Levchin.

http://younoodle.com/startups/younoodle

Slide

Slide is the largest personal media network in the world, reaching 144 million unique global viewers each month and more than 30 percent of the U.S. Internet audience. It helps people express themselves and tell stories through personalized photos and videos created on Slide.com and viewed anywhere on the web or desktop.

Slide’s products — including Slideshows, FunWall and SuperPoke! — are popular on top social networking and blog platforms, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged and Blogger. Slide is also the leading developer on Facebook with more than 95 million applications installed and the most active users than any other developer.

Launched in 2005 and founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Slide is backed by Mayfield Fund, Blue Run Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund.

http://younoodle.com/startups/slide

Occupation: Student / Managing Director of Boso.com

www.boso.com

Harjeet Taggar is co-founder and Managing Director of Boso.co.uk, the first online marketplace exclusively for students in the UK. He is a final year undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford reading Law. You can read Harj’s blog at blog.harjtaggar.com

Profile of BOSO

• Boso is the first online marketplace exclusively for students but operates differently to the e-bay model. Rather than charging any listing or commission fees the site is completely free to use.
• The site only allows students with a valid email to register and only then can they post items for sale or view contacts details for current sellers. The idea is for students to be able to meet each other face to face on campus to complete the transaction. Combining a traceable email address with this face to face element virtually eliminates the fraud risk.
• Boso now has a user base of just under 1,000 members and has received over 200,000 hits. The site continues to grow each day has recently been expanded to create a national site for all students.

Personal profile:

I began working on Boso at the start of this year after attending a Young Enterprise Graduate Program team building session. Kulveer had thought of the marketplace concept a while back and I thought it sounded like a potentially very interesting project. I took the initial lead and the idea of a student marketplace eventually became the reality that is Boso. It’s been a great experience and one of the highlights was definitely giving a speech to over a hundred students at Warwick about how to become involved in entrepreneurship.

During my time at Oxford I’ve been involved in a number of student societies such as Future Flyers, The Oxford Majlis Society, Merton JCR, The Halsbury Society and now Oxford Entrepreneurs. OE is definitely different to any other society I’ve been in involved with and getting national press coverage for the society has been a great challenge to get my teeth into. The society has now appeared several times in the national press, including the Sunday Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian.

Problems he’s had and how he’s overcome them:

The biggest problem I had was my own self-confidence. Having never done anything entrepreneurial before or having led a team of this size (there are currently eleven people working on Boso) I doubted whether I would actually be able to pull this off.

I think this is the biggest problem for most people looking to start their own venture and I overcame this by just asking myself what I had to lose. As a university student even if the idea didn’t work out it wouldn’t be the end of the world and I’d learn a whole range of skills and experiences that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Major successes:

• Launching the site and receiving over 600 registrations and 100,000 hits in just 8 weeks
• Being featured on the homepage of the Oxford University website
• Media coverage from the BBC, Times Online, The Guardian, Real World Magazine and The Run Down
• Support from not only Oxford University but also the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges in the UK

What I love about (social) entrepreneurship:

To be honest the thing I love most about entrepreneurship is not having to fake an interest in something. At the end of the say, people don’t go into conventional career paths like banking or law because of their deep passion for either. It’s the money that is attractive but I love being able to work on something that I actually have a passion for and deciding how I want to do things. For me that’s unbeatable.

harj@boso.com

Age: 23

As a founding member of Oxford Entrepreneurs, Kulveer went on to establish the society as one the most enterprising in the country during his tenure as President. He founded Idea Idol, paved the way for future expansion by setting up the first successful rollout at LSE, and led the society on to a national profile.

Whilst still an undergraduate, Kulveer successfully invested in property in three continents, and cofounded Boso, the biggest online student marketplace in the UK. Having raised funding from the prestigious venture firm Y Combinator, Kulveer is currently out in San Francisco, where he is looking to raise further investment.

Kulveer blogs at kulveer.co.uk and is happy to share his experiences in starting a company and raising investment.

Projects

Auctomatic

January 2007 – present, San Francisco, CA
Cofounder and CEO of Auctomatic – an online eBay selling utility.
Launched Mar 2007.
Angel funded.
Y Combinator funded.

Boso

February 2005 – present, San Francisco, CA
Cofounder and CEO of Boso.com – a marketplace which taps into the natural liquidity at universities.
Launched Feb 2005. 3,000+ sellers. Mainly Oxford, growing in London, Manchester and Nottingham.
$300k+ seed funding from UK Angels and first non-US startup to be selected for Y Combinator.
Evan Williams is an early advisor and shareholder.
Watch Kulveer on Channel 4’s Tricky Business here! Check out Kulveer’s items for sale and sign up.

Deutsche Bank

July 2001 – Feb 2006, London, UK
Research assistant to the Chief UK Economist (2001-2002, full time)
Successful 10-week internship in Global Markets, Credit Structuring and Commodities Research (2004)
Analyst in the Graduate Program, class of 2005.

Oxford Entrepreneurs

Jan 2004 – present, Oxford, UK
Cofounder, former President and now Vice-Chairman of Oxford University’s first organisation for student entrepreneurs
Pioneered “Idea Idol“, a competition to showcase innovative business ideas, which received coverage from BBC News Online.
Hosted successful Game-Changer series with Karan Bilimoria (CEO Cobra Beer), Dinesh Dhamija (Ebookers plc) and Stelios (EasyGroup).
Nominated by peers as a FreshMinds Ones to Watch in 2004.

Lateral Invest

June 2003 – present, London, UK
Wrote a business plan and raised investment to profitably invest in real estate in 3 continents.

Education

St. John’s College, University of Oxford 2002 – 2005 BA (Hons) Politics, Philosophy and Economics
Eltham College, 1991 – 2001
Scholar and ranked 50th nationally in Maths.

Kulveer can be contacted online on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Age: 26
Occupation: D.Phil student in philosophy and co-founder of www.liveout.co.uk

Richard Price is a co-founder of LiveOut and a prize fellow of All Souls College, where he is doing a D.Phil in philosophy.

Profile of LiveOut and Future Ambitions:

LiveOut is the first online student property database in Oxford. Our aim is to make the process of finding a student house much quicker and easier. Features of the site include:

• 90% of Oxford ’s estate agents list with us
• 600 properties in our database
• Photos and Google maps of the properties
• 100% free for students to use
• Flatmate-finding forum for students to find flatmates

Other members of the team include Stephen Hartley, Dave Nash, Alasdair Bell and Paul Doerwald.

Our plan is to roll out LiveOut in student cities across the country.

Problems he’s had and how he’s overcome them:

The first issue was building the team. Here OE and the synergy database were key. I met Steve on the committee of OE, and met Dave and Paul through synergy.

Once we had the team the next step was to talk to estate agents in Oxford to see what they thought of the idea. Fortunately they were all enthusiastic and also gave us ideas for the site.

We definitely had a time problem. The rush for student property begins in January, and the site wasn’t ready until mid-December, so we had to cut back on some of the features that we wanted on the site just to launch in time.

Major successes:

• Launching the site and getting 600 properties in our database.
• Receiving 200,000 hits in the first month.
• Becoming profitable in the second month.

As cofounder and Chairman of Oxford Entrepreneurs, Bob is a leading contributor to the recent rise in entrepreneurialism at UK universities. Having set up profitable design and publishing companies as an undergraduate, he began a sabbatical from his masters degree in April 2004 when headhunted by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin to help start consumer technology companies at his San Francisco incubator, Midtown Doornail. Bob advises a number of student start-ups and welcomes contact from OE members.

Projects

Yelp! Inc., Sept 2004 – present, San Francisco, CA

• Product Manager of Yelp.com – a way to discover and share the best of your city.
• Launched Jan 2005. 20,000+ writers. Mainly SF, growing in Boston, Chicago and Seattle.
• $3M-8M Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners. Business Week’s Best of the New Web 2005: Home Services.
• Check out Bob’s Yelp reviews and sign up.

Chatango, April 2004 – Sept 2004, San Francisco, CA

• Cofounder and Product Manager of the first in-browser instant messenger for consumers.
• Originally designed to provide instant communication for online auctions, Chatango was stunted when banned by eBay, becoming popular instead in blog communities Xanga and MySpace.
• 200,000 sign ups in the first 12 months with no ad or marketing spend. To chat to visitors of your blog or website get yours.

Oxford Entrepreneurs, Oct 2002 – present, Oxford, UK

• Cofounder and Chairman of Oxford University’s first organisation for student entrepreneurs.
• Showcased nationally by the Department of Trade and Industry at Living Innovation 2003 as ‘one of the top three organisations in the UK for supporting innovation and enterprise’.
• Watch TV presenter Adam Hart-Davis interview Bob, Kaori and Jenna using Windows Media Player or Real Player.

Prana Publications, Sept 2002 – present, Norwich, UK

• Started a yoga club at UEA – now the most popular society at the University, winning the Outstanding Contribution to Societies Award 1999 and Society of the Year 2002.
• To help students practice independently Bob devised a yoga guide on audio CD – Yoga Retreat and published it across the UK.
• Top ratings from Yoga Magazine, Spectrum and Yoga and Health, stocked by some of Europe’s largest yoga retailers, including Yoga Matters and Yoga Mad, with several thousand copies sold.
• Try this free sample seated at your desk and order your copy by phone +44 (0) 20 8888 8588 or buy online (RRP £14.99).

Turton Creative Marketing Solutions, Summer 2002, Norwich, UK

• Bob worked with the Directors of this agency, writing copy for English Country Cottages (circulation 2m), made strategic recommendations to StartRite Shoes and led market research for the Construction Industry Training Board.

Inspired, May 2000 – Sept 2002, Norwich, UK

• Bob created corporate identities for eight companies, with students contributing design and creative. The motto was ‘Give your venture a vision’.
• Branded TML Ltd., a £20M national building maintenance company (acquired by OCS Group).

Education

University of Oxford 2002 – 2004
MPhil Medieval English Literature (AHRB Scholar) – pending completion University of East Anglia, Norwich 1999 – 2002
BA (Hons) English Literature, Starred First Class (1st of 254)

Kaori did her undergraduate work looking at deployable structures in nature (things that fold away, such as a leaf in a bud), and her masters degree in medical equipment. While studying stents she visited a Japanese art exhibition and saw an origami fir cone, modelled to open and close. Inspired by this Kaori developed an original origami pattern to create a new type of “stent”.

A stent is a medical device used to open blocked sites in the human body, ranging from blood vessels to the oesophagus. Traditionally they are like wire netting, opened manually by pulling a metal lever. There are two major disadvantages: there are holes in the structure and opening it manually is obviously difficult and potentially harmful.

The new stent is made from shape memory alloy, which means it expands when it senses body temperature and no longer has to be opened manually. It also has no gaps, unlike a traditional stent. Kaori has spent the last 3 years developing this device at Oxford, doing a PhD.

Describe the advantages over existing solutions

• Does not allow materials to pass through the structure, making it more effective.
• The first stent design to have no holes.
• Opens automatically in the body by sensing body temperature.
• The first stent not to require manual opening.

Successes

• This is a revolutionary improvement of a common piece of medical equipment, resulting in an anticipated market of $2bn.
• Kaori holds an international patent for the stents, supported by ISIS Innovation.
• Selected as a finalist for the Oxford Business Idea Competition 2002.