Wednesday saw a great evening of learning as a result of a new collaboration event with Tech Dragons.
Alacrity’s Guy Wendon worked alongside Nicholas Fearn, founder of Tech Dragons, to set up the eighth event of the Tech Dragons Meetup series. With thanks to Mark John for hosting us at the fantastic Tramshed Tech we were ready to go.
We invited a wide selection of guests including university students from partner universities Cardiff and Swansea, members of the Tech Dragons community and graduates from the Alacrity network.
Nicholas Fearn opened the evening alongside Alacrity CEO Wil Williams, welcoming the guests and offering thanks to those that had worked towards making the event happen.
Shortly after, Enjovia managing director, Sam Gibson started the evenings talks by offering his perspective on life as a entrepreneur. Starting with how his working life, starting in telesales at Admiral gave him a desire to achieve more, leading to his careers progression with positions working for the likes of YBS and Benbria before starting his Business Development position at the Alacrity Foundation.
He gave us a brief insight into the work that Enjovia does before expanding on how his experiences within the entrepreneur circle of life had helped shape his decisions and understanding of how to succeed. He discussed how the official definition of what an entrepreneur is, isn’t his perspective of how actually being one is. Stating that he thinks an entrepreneur is;
a person who is searching for answers to create a sustainable business.
He emphasised the ‘searching’ part of his definition, explaining that a vital part of the success cycle is searching on a regular basis for things such as new customers or features that will improve your services. Overall an eye opening presentation, that concluded with a strong final sentiment;
Your effort is directly proportional to your success.
Why work to make someone else rich and successful?
With a good topic for discussion over food, pizza arrived in a timely manner offering an opportunity for guests to network further before reconvening to listen to the evenings next speaker, Craig Barnett of Culturvate.
Craig, director of sales and distribution, opened with his presentation being orientated around employee engagement and how satisfied employees make a difference in the workplace. Culturvate, one of the more recent graduates of the Foundation, received their investment fund back in October joining the growing list of Alacrity graduate companies.
With their product lines featuring two products; Teamphoria, a social platform aimed to increase employee engagement, as well as their other offerings being expanded with the newly launched innovation platform, designed to encourage collaboration on new and developing business solutions.
He highlighted how both platforms are designed primarily to improve employee engagement with the latest workforce’s largest group being millennials, with only 29% of which saying they were engaged at their jobs. Barnett concluded his talk with the help of one of his influencers, Richard Branson, is well known for his involvement in ensuring his employees are both satisfied and engaged, having been quoted saying;
Clients do not come first.
Employees come first.
If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.
Alacrity’s very own business leads, Peter Allan and Robert Van Den Bergh concluded the evenings presentations. Starting off by describing their experiences with the programme so far, they explained how their early experiences of the initial BootCamp gave them room to grow their technical knowledge as well as platform to develop relationships with potential colleagues prior to forming their teams.
Following the BootCamp they explored a collection of potential projects by working alongside Alacrity’s strategic partners to develop ideas from a variety of industries before moving forward.
This helped explain their initially bizarre opening slide of the lifelong question of which came first ‘Chicken or the Egg?’; referencing to whether the problem or the solution for the problem came first. They highlighted the difficulty involved in becoming the next Uber or Google, primarily due to market saturation but also due to the strain in finding a niche to create a company of such stature from.
Business lead Robert went on to discuss the value of data, how companies in the US are making larger volumes of data available to the public and with data being one of a businesses most valuable assets, how this could potentially be a good market to move into.
He also shone light on the development in 5G technology, explaining how the current 4G network is no longer able to keep up with the either the supply or the demand of devices that it is being utilised by, with on average 6.5 devices per person being connected including devices such as smartphones and wearables.
The evening finished on high as with a final round of applause for all, we moved to Tiny Rebel’s Urban Tap House on Womanby Street to conclude the night.
Overall, a successful outing for the Foundation with both ourselves and the Tech Dragons society bringing technology into the capitals spotlight.