Britain's new entrepreneurs: young guns go for it

Today's internet-savvy students are starting their own businesses and forging their own
path in life and here are seven prime examples
POPPY DINSEY, 23: Fashion blogger
It is 10am on the first day of London fashion week and Poppy Dinsey has already been
photographed four times. "I think it's the coat," she says as yet another blogging
fashionista takes a snap of her canary yellow Burberry mackintosh. "I am a walking
highlighter, essentially."
The coat is just one example of Dinsey's uncanny ability to channel the latest sartorial
trends with consummate ease. Last year, she turned this talent into a thriving business
by launching What I Wore Today (wiwt.com), a blog that does exactly what it says on the
tin by uploading photographs of Dinsey's chosen outfit on a regular basis, accompanied
by her irreverent commentary (a jumper featuring an appliqu reindeer is deemed: "Well
Christmassy. Cut me, I bleed port"). The website has details of where to buy the clothes,
and for each sale directed through wiwt.com, Dinsey gets a percentage.
"I started the site as a new year's resolution," she says, sipping a coffee outside
Somerset House in London as various model types totter past in impractical high heels
and voluminous capes. "I was already posting what I wore on Twitter. I had 2,500
followers before I launched the site and I thought I'd try it for a year to see what
happened. It wasn't a ball-ache to do. I mean, I'm getting dressed every day anyway."
But Dinsey has turned getting dressed into a successful business model: there are now
plans to expand the site into a social network where anyone can upload their daily outfits
and where there will be competitions in different parts of the country where users can
vote for "the most fashionable" in Leeds, Manchester or Bristol. Again, any sale made
through the website will be monetised through affiliate deals. Vodafone was so impressed
by Dinsey that it recruited her to be an official blogger at London fashion week.
"The site kind of supports itself but I'm here being paid by Vodafone and that sponsorship
is what keeps me afloat," she says. "The biggest outlay was 4,000 to buy the domain
name because I realised if I was trying to build a global brand, it wasn't going to work
without the dotcom."
It is, perhaps, a curious career for a woman who graduated from UCL in economics,
business and east European studies in 2008, but Dinsey insists she never liked the
traditional office environment. After graduating, she worked for two web start-up
companies specialising in property searches "If I worked hard on something and it didn't
get used, I'd be furious. And I got really sick of working with estate agents."
Instead, she moved back in with her parents, near Guildford, and set up What I Wore
Today. The recession, Dinsey says, has changed young people's attitude towards
entrepreneurship.
"There's a feeling that there's nothing to lose a lot of people are broke. I don't have
money to go out but even my friends in full-time employment have less money so it's
not like they're all out doing champagne while I'm stuck at home. That's made it easier."

And does she already know what she will be wearing tomorrow? "Oh yeah. I've got it all
written down and planned for the week ahead." She laughs. "I've turned my OCD into
a business." Elizabeth Day

JAMAL EDWARDS, 20: Founder of online music channel SBTV

"I'm a rebel when it comes to filming," says Jamal Edwards, founder of SBTV, an online
broadcaster of music promos, video interviews and impromptu live performances from
the UK rap scene and beyond. "I'll film absolutely everywhere, without permits or
anything. This is a guerrilla operation."
We are sitting in the nerve centre of the operation: the kitchen of Edwards's family home
in Acton, west London. Waiting nearby is Tayong Azonga, a local rapper who, any minute
now, will become SBTV's next star performer.
Edwards started the channel in 2007, aged 16, after receiving a video camera for
Christmas. At first, he trained the camera on his estate. "I was filming foxes in my
garden. When I uploaded that, I got 1,000 views and I was like, 'What? Let me just try
something else.'"
At the time, grime music, the now ubiquitous hybrid of hip-hop and UK garage, was
burgeoning. You wouldn't find grime on mainstream TV channels not yet so artists
disseminated videos of their work on DVD or YouTube. The space for an online channel
dedicated to grime music was wide open.
Edwards started filming London rappers freestyling on the street, backstage at gigs or in
the back seats of cars. The performances, delivered straight to camera without studio
gloss and posted online within days, are raw and often thrilling. But Edwards didn't want
to restrict himself to local unsigned talent or the grime scene.
Recently, he and his eight-strong team have been filming the likes of Ellie Goulding, Nicki
Minaj and Bruno Mars. Even Justin Bieber has appeared before the SBTV cameras.
"Narrow-minded people are like, 'Ah, he's filming all these pop stars,'" says Edwards.
"But I just shrug my shoulders."
His attitude appears to be paying off. Edwards says the channel, which makes money
from advertising, has racked up 50,000 subscribers and a total of 39 million video views.
Last month, he signed a deal with Sony RCA to create his own imprint within the label,
and the day before our interview he was hanging out with Simon Cowell, who said SBTV
was excellent. Suddenly, the bio on Edwards's Twitter account "media mogul" doesn't
seem like an exaggeration.
When I ask him what the downsides are of being his own boss, Edwards says: "Everyone
who works for me is older than me." He pauses and grins. "OK, the oldest person is 24,
but I'm a young boss. It's a bit daunting telling people what to do." His friends think his
rise from borderline dropout at Ealing College, where he completed a diploma in media

and moving image, to budding media mogul is "mad just mental". He advises other
young people with similar ambitions to "chase your dream, not the competition, because
looking at the competition will cloud your vision and mess you up in the long run".
Edwards says his next step is to go to New York and "work my way from the ground to
the top, doing what I did here over there". The competition will be stiff but he's not fazed.
"I'm a rebel. I'm not scared to do anything: that's what makes me different."
Now it's time to see the rebel in action. Edwards and Azonga slip off and I catch up with
them in the underground car park of a supermarket. Edwards is already filming a rapper
from Margate called English Frank, who rhymes with apocalyptic fury over a beat
pumping out of his car stereo. Passing shoppers regard the scene with total
bemusement. When English Frank drives off, Azonga opens the door of his car, hits play
on the stereo and turns to face the camera. He gives a shout-out to the channel, adjusts
his cap and launches into a slick, motormouth rap. In a few days, tens of thousands of
SBTV viewers will see his video featured alongside the likes of P Diddy and Jessie J. When
Azonga is done, Edwards reviews the footage with satisfaction. "That," he says with a
grin, "was sick." Killian Fox
JOSHUA MAGIDSON, 24: Founder of online ordering site eatstudent

You are a first-year university student returning from a long night at the pub with an
urgent need to fill an empty stomach. You scour your halls of residence for takeaway
menus home-cooking is out of the question and find none, so you go online in search
of your nearest pizza producer.
That was the experience Joshua Magidson had during his first few weeks at Nottingham
University in 2006. Unable to find a list of takeaways on the internet, let alone menus and
ordering facilities, he and some friends decided to create an online directory for their
fellow students.
"Originally it wasn't even a business idea. But then we realised that the people who ran
the takeaways were keen, so it was a no-brainer to charge them for it. The business went
from there."
At first, eatstudent.co.uk was a pocket-money earner that they managed on the side, but
as Magidson prepared to graduate in 2008 the economy was giving out negative signals.
"I had friends who'd left the year before and still didn't have jobs. One guy did 30
interviews before he was taken on."
It was decision time. "We could either subject ourselves to all these interviews or we
could just go for it. I didn't have a mortgage or a family to support and I was living at
home rent-free. If I was going to be an entrepreneur, now was the time."
After graduating, Magidson and co-founder Edward Green started rolling out to other
universities. They upgraded the site and introduced an online ordering system, but
business was slow to pick up. "The main downside initially was the fact that we didn't
have a wage. In this industry, you need a large volume of orders to start making any
money at all and we were getting two or three orders a night."

As eatstudent's popularity spread (thanks to vigorous marketing campaigns and slogans

such as "Sex, Drugs and Egg Spring Rolls"), its founders worked at nights and weekends
to make sure that orders went through and hungry customers were satisfied. The
business came close to failing several times but eventually the hard work paid off. Last
August, an established online ordering company called JustEat saw the lucrative niche
that eatstudent was tapping "We're the only one that solely targets students" and
poured money into the site.
Now, Magidson has more than 300 restaurants and 15 UK universities in his database. He
moved operations from his bedroom at home to the JustEat offices in north London and
he has just hired his first full-time employee, a sales manager fresh from university.
(Green left last year to start his own company.) Magidson's aim now is "to grow as quickly
as possible to all the universities in the UK and turn this into a national brand". He also
has an eye on the international market.
"I'd definitely encourage doing something like this instead of finding a safety-net job," he
says. "It's so much more interesting and it means you handle every single aspect of
business. Even if it fails and you decide to get a job instead, you've got genuine
experience on your CV and you can speak about things you've done. I think that's so
much more impressive." KF
GRARD JONES, 21: Founder of the Grard School of Football

Third-year student Grard Jones is taking a rare day off work to show me his footballing
empire. Standing in the penalty box of a pitch at Hull University, we stop to paw its "3G"
surface; rubbery and crumbly, it resembles tarred grass but is "genius", I'm assured. It's
also the proposed surface for his new 3.5m training ground. Meet Grard Jones: founder
of the Grard School of Football and, at 21, Arsenal's youngest director of football in the
club's soccer schools' history.
Despite a decent stint as a youth professional for Halifax Town and a trial at Chelsea,
Jones's fledging career was terminated, quite suddenly, at 19. "I had my contract ripped
up in my face, actually ripped. I didn't have a pot to piss in." Still reeling from shock, he
applied to study sports coaching at Hull and by spring the following year had set up a
local coaching school.
In its first year, the Grard School of Football taught more than 4,000 pupils and
transformed Jones into a local hero. A vast poster of him, decked out in his "unique"
Guantnamo orange-coloured GSF kit, hangs in the city's main shopping centre. A year
later, he was spotted by Arsenal's soccer schools and assigned to run their Humberside &
East Yorkshire branch and given a role as scout for the club's youth team.
Jones loves what he does, refuses to disclose what he earns ("enough") and keeps mum
about his dealings with Arsne Wenger ("a quiet man"). Such modestyis unusual in
football but, given Jones's wobbly trajectory, it is unsurprising.
"I always knew I'd make a better coach than player," he confesses over a canteen fry-up
by the science block and it's his very "failings" that form the meat of his method.
Basically he says, he lacked 'attitude' "If I had 3,000 people screaming for my blood, I'd
crumble. Why? Because I wasn't taught how to deal with the mental stuff." Jones's
coaching method very much deals deals with "the mental stuff" .

Still, Jones misses playing football and should a club call, admits that he'd sign in a
heartbeat. "But I'd miss this," he says, picking at a box of chips, "the junk food, the selfemployment. Man Utd wanted me as a coach, I but I wanted to do something off my own
whack so I said no."
His school also serves as rehab for fallen footballers: one coach was released from Hull
City and worked at a call centre before Jones employed him. Another worked the tills at
Tesco before coaching part-time. He employs 10 staff in total, including his parents.
Further expansion is on hold until Jones graduates, though. He grimaces: "My degree's so
boring. I don't think it's worth doing one unless you are entering into law or something
and I want to be England manager." Ambitious, maybe, but given that, post-World Cup,
Jones, then 20, was given odds of 1,000/1 to replace Fabio Capello, not unrealistic.
"That's worth a tenner, surely?" Morwenna Ferrier
GEORGINA COOPER, 26: Founder of pretaportobello.com

Three years ago, Georgina Cooper found herself lying on the sofa of her two older sisters'
flat, without a job and wondering what to do with herself. She had just graduated from
Bournemouth University with a design degree and had spent a few months doing work
placements in fashion houses. "It was really awful," she says now. "It was such a
competitive environment, with long hours for no reward, and it was not what I wanted to
do." The recession made it harder to find the ideal job: "I felt I'd end up having to settle
for something."
Instead, with the help of her sisters, Lisette and Victoria, she decided to turn what she
already liked doing trawling London's Portobello market for clothes into a viable online
business. "I used to go to Portobello all the time and my friends at uni would always ask,
'Oh, where did you get that?' When I told them they would say, 'We live too far away to
get down there.' So we had this idea to make the market available online for people who
couldn't get there or didn't want to go when it was raining."
The result was pretaportobello.com, a one-stop internet shop for unique finds, including
one-off vintage pieces and a "Let's Trade" area which allows users to barter for pieces
with a virtual stallholder. The sisters funded it with their savings, buying stock outright
from market traders and then selling it on at a mark-up.
"When we launched in May 2008, we weren't expecting it to be so popular," admits
Cooper, who now employs a PR company to deal with media inquiries. We meet in their
cramped offices in central London, lined with racks of brightly coloured clothes and handprinted scarves. "The next thing I know, I'm in this tiny flat in Fulham surrounded by
boxes with no room to move. We didn't have any buying experience and we still don't. All
we knew was the stuff we liked."
But their taste seemed to strike a chord: the sisters are now generating enough money to
pay each other "a very small salary" and Cooper has plans to expand the site to
incorporate markets across the world in Australia, Brazil and Italy.
Last year, she won 1,000 in a Daily Mail Enterprising Young Brit award and promptly
lost it. "To this day, I haven't found it," she says, blushing. "After a few days, I had to
email the lady and tell her." When she received the replacement cheque, what did she

use it for? "It went straight back into the business. I could have gone on holiday with it
but if you have your own business, that goes out of the window. I'd have felt too guilty."
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