I’m going to talk today a little about young entrepreneurship, something which we are trying to encourage here at school, under the leadership of Mr Everitt; and specifically, I am going to mention two recent stories in the press where young people only a few years older than you have been entrepreneurial in different ways. For the first one, you will need to know what a baby incubator is. An incubator is essentially an enclosed cot for a small baby, inside which are the conditions designed to protect that baby from illness and even death and encourage conditions for it to grow safely. The most common reason for needing one is if the baby is born prematurely – in other words well before its full development in the womb has taken place – and therefore still needs the conditions of a kind of second womb to be able to develop. One in ten babies are born prematurely. But there are plenty of other reasons why a baby may need an incubator to survive. Illness, breathing issues or a particularly traumatic birth might be some.
So here, from the newspapers recently, is the story of James Roberts, who spotted that babies born in warzones were particularly at risk – one can only look at the lack of hospital facilities in Gaza currently, or near the front line in Ukraine, to fear for young babies’ survival rates.
For most undergraduates, getting a decent grade on their final-year project is their main goal. But James Roberts had loftier ambitions.
When he was 22 and studying for a degree in product design at Loughborough University, he was inspired to invent a folding incubator for premature babies to save lives after watching a documentary about Syria. “I thought, ‘This is a problem I could work on that could really change things’,” he said.
Now 31, his dream is a reality. His product, which is more compact and simpler than conventional incubators and is manufactured in Felixstowe, Suffolk, has helped save more than 1,500 babies in Ukraine.
Its main design features are that it is foldable and lightweight. But crucially, it can run off battery power, which has proven invaluable as systematic Russian attacks on the country’s power plants and electricity grid have often left Ukrainians without a regular supply of electricity.
“When you are sent a photograph of someone at the very beginning of their life who has been impacted by something your team has done, it’s indescribably special,” he said. “We’ve had many sleepless nights developing this incubator, but when you see its impact, all the difficult moments are forgotten. There’s a real sense of accomplishment.”
Now, 75 of his incubators are being used in hospital wards and bomb shelters across Ukraine, and the country’s ministry of health has asked for 100 more. He has received letters from doctors saying it was the only solution to care for premature babies in shelters and demand is still rising, not least as the stresses of war placed on expectant mothers can lead to an increased number of premature babies. One in ten babies are born premature — at least three weeks before their due date, although many are born far earlier. One dies every 40 seconds, but three-quarters of these deaths are preventable with appropriate interventions, including being placed in a warm environment such as an incubator. So what an achievement for such a young man.
As a school, we have spoken to about 40 OB entrepreneurs in the last year or two, trying to find out what they felt were the key skills and attributes needed to be an entrepreneur, so that we could try to ensure that you are taught these things over your time at school.
One of the key requirements that came up was that you must know yourself – know your own strengths and weaknesses – so that you do not head off in the wrong direction, and so that you have the humility to seek help in the areas which you do not know about yourself. James Roberts studied product design, so he had good knowledge in one area; but will have needed help with all sorts of things he had no idea about. If you are of the age to take up the Ivy House course in the Lower Sixth, that is all about ‘knowing yourself’ and the ways that you can bring your strengths to the world around you – do it; it is brilliant. Another key requirement was drive. Entrepreneurship comes with multiple failures, heavy workloads and significant stress. You need to have a reason for doing it. t took James Roberts nine years to achieve a start. For him it was a genuine desire to help people. For others it may be money. For others it may be a real passion for something. But knowing your strengths and weaknesses also applies to other areas of life – and not everybody is likely to be an entrepreneur. There are plenty of attributes which were listed as having helped our OB entrepreneurs – energy, confidence, humility, likeability, a smile, the ability to read other people, creativity, curiosity, problem solving, competitiveness, calculated risk taking, a ‘bit by bit’ approach, technical knowledge, the ability to keep the complex simple. Lastly, you need to spot a need, or a hole in the market. James Roberts spotted the need – incubators in war zones and the sheer number of babies dying without one – and he had the desire and self-knowledge to do something about it.
Here’s another recent newspaper article, this time with a different business, under the headline, “After a lot of hard work and a little luck, I am a millionaire at 22”.
Notice how many of the things I mentioned above were applicable to Harry, from hard work, to drive, to knowing himself, to spotting a gap in the market, to humility:
While most of Harry Gestetner’s university friends were celebrating their graduation last June, there was little time for the British-born entrepreneur to uncork the champagne. Instead, he was buried in paperwork and flying back and forth from New Orleans to Los Angeles to negotiate selling his company, Fanfix. Three weeks later the deal was done: less than a year after it had launched, Fanfix, which allows creators to earn money by posting exclusive content to paying subscribers, was acquired for a reported $65 million (£52 million).
The bumper payday was a culmination of a childhood and adolescence spent tinkering with money-making ideas, said Gestetner, who moved to the United States from London with his family when he was 15, and is now 22. “I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. On the weekends when other kids wanted to watch football, I just wanted to watch Dragons’ Den and build businesses.”
He said he tried to start his first company, a clothing brand, when he was 11 [years old]. It was all going well until he spoke to the wholesaler on the phone and they heard how young he was. “That kind of ruined things.” A couple of years later he started bulk buying scented pencils and selling them to friends at his north London private school for a profit.
Things ramped up when he moved with his family to LA seven years ago. “I was very inspired by the scale of America and the level of ambition,” he said. When Gestetner went off to New Orleans to study at Tulane University, he tried to set up an online marketplace for students to buy and sell everything from furniture to textbooks but it failed before it even launched.
“We had problems with the developers and just couldn’t get the app built,” Gestetner said. His first real success was building Fuel our Heroes, a site to raise money for healthcare workers at the start of the pandemic, which had more than 140 students working on it part-time, who collectively raised $500,000. “It was lots of fun managing people and overseeing a big team as we scaled, seeing people posting about it from all over the country and from all these different schools.”
Around the same time as he realised the power of social media to help ventures grow quickly, his cousin was going viral on TikTok, getting tens of millions of views and tonnes of followers but “couldn’t make any money. And I was quite shocked [about that],” Gestetner said.
He spotted a gap in the market, found a partner, raised $1.3 million and the rest is history – you can look up Fanfix, if you are interested in more. An amazing story.
So, I am going to leave the last word with Harry and the conclusion to the newspaper article:
Despite becoming a millionaire as a result of the deal, Gestetner claims his lifestyle hasn’t changed. “I drive my sister’s car, which is an old Mazda, and I live in a rented house with three roommates from college. I still do the same trips with my friends, so no I haven’t changed my life. What it did change is it showed me what’s possible and made me so much more hungry to go and do this again at a bigger scale. To have a win under the belt now shows me what’s possible.”
He added that starting young was an advantage for him, and urged young people to take a punt on bold start-up ideas. “It’s a different risk calculation for a 20-year-old college student than for a 47-year-old with kids and a mortgage. So I’d say, don’t wait. You can’t learn the theory of entrepreneurship; you’ve just got to go and do it.”
If you have an idea, or indeed a current business, that you need some help with, please do go and have a chat with Mr Everitt.