The Power of Failure: Informed Funding Meet up at Plexal - 5th June
Event Information
Description
The Power of Failure: The funding landscapes and leadership lessons for the age of entrepreneurship
Join Informed Funding at our meetup as we bring together expertise from the world's first equity crowdfunding platform, a community-driven seed stage Venture Capital Fund, the 2018 winner of the Next Women Pitch Competition for female entrepreneurs looking for business funding and the author of Inspiring Innovation: 75 marketing tales to help you find your next big thing. “Inspiring Innovation” is a compilation of marketing origin tales of the biggest brands and products, inventions created from the ashes of failure to stories of embarrassment and anger.
Beauhurst track some of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses to get a better idea of how successful (or otherwise) they are, once they have raised investment., Many use equity investment to help them grow and, by plotting successes and failures, Beauhurst present a mixed, albeit interesting, picture. In “Startups of yesteryear”, 19% of the initial 1,155 companies tracked failed in some regard, with an additional 10% of the companies tracked failing to grow beyond seed-stage. Over a quarter have gone on to fail or stagnate, representing nearly £700m in lost capital.
Thomas Edison, one of the world’s greatest historical innovators is commonly known to have argued that innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. According to Harvard Business Review, there are three variables in the innovation equation: Innovation = ƒ(Strategy + Creativity + Execution) but what role does failure play? Ground breaking businesses learn from failing businesses…….and destroy businesses to create better businesses.
Join us as we share key lessons borne out of failure, the importance of embracing failure and its power to drive innovation and value through successfully experimenting with new ideas. For those about to, or who have recently raised finance, we’ll be drilling our panel for key lessons you can take home to your business.
This Meetup is free for Plexal and Here East members and guests of EFM and Clarity Wealth Management, £15+VAT for all others.
Meetup Timetable:
10:00am Arrival | Attendees from outside of the Plexal and Here East campus arrival for check-in
10:15am to 11:30am | Panel Discussion & Audience Q&A
11:30am to 12:00 | Networking
Location:
Plexal based in the Former Press Centre in the Olympic Village in Stratford is a workspace designed to resemble a mini-city, they have their very own indoor park, private phone booths, high street, town hall and workshop space for rapid prototyping (which comes stocked with 3D printers and scanners).
Why? Because they believe innovators need two things: opportunities to connect with people and space to think or create in quiet. And cities do both those things – which is why they’ve been hotbeds of innovation for thousands of years.
They’re just a few moments from many of London’s most important travel hubs.
Innovation Hub at Plexal, 14 East Bay Lane, The Press Centre, Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, London, E152GW
Meetup Experts:
Daisy Onubogu, Head of Scouting at Backed VC
Backed is a community-driven seed stage VC fund based in London.
Daisy is working hard to grow and systematise community-sourced deal flow. She's also an Advisor at Roam, Emerge, and sits on the board of global charity, Future Brilliance. Previously, she was in charge of inviting A-list speakers to Web Summit and its sister conferences. She co-founded Refugee Info Network (a project around gathering EU asylum information to supply to refugee camps in Lesbos and Calais), and in 2017, joined the ranks of Sunday Business Post’s 30 under 30. She enjoys travel, pies, medium sarcasm, and facilitating connections to make things happen.
Patrick Ryan, Head of Inbound at Crowdcube
Crowdcube is a British investment crowdfunding platform, the world's first equity crowdfunding platform.
Patrick started his career in the drinks business with Pernod Ricard, and then worked in consulting for the Irish state enterprise agency, before starting his first company, a vodka brand.
It failed, but many lessons were learned. He went on to work at Crowdcube and has helped clients raise over £20 million in equity finance in the past two years.
Khaleelah Jones, Founder and CEO of Careful Feet Digital
Careful Feet is a digital marketing agency that works exclusively with start-ups and SMEs on any and every step of their business journey. The 2018 winner of the Next Women Pitch Competition for female entrepreneurs looking for business funding and part of a team of five at WellTok that closed $18m is Series B funding (prior to starting her agency), Khaleelah has a PhD in emerging media, an MBA and has worked in the marketing industry for over a decade.
Giles Lury, leading brand consultant and Executive Chairman at The Value Engineers.
Giles is the author of Inspiring Innovation: 75 marketing tales to help you find your next big thing. “Inspiring Innovation” is a compilation of marketing origin tales of the biggest brands and products. Inventions created from the ashes of failure, to stories of embarrassment and anger, from people watching and more.
Giles has worked in advertising, market research, packaging design, corporate identity and brand consultancy. His specialist subjects are brand positioning, brand architecture, and innovation.
Meetup Organiser and Chair
Diarra Smith, Operations Director at Informed Funding
Diarra leads the delivery of key strategic partnerships and events across the business. Informed Funding is an online and offline information resource designed to help business owners and directors identify the range of options available to them to raise finance. Diarra started his career in a data services consultancy supporting the Cabinet Office and leading UK research bodies. He has experience supporting clients across the political and violent risk analysis and regulatory monitoring space. In 2018, Diarra was a Top 10 finalist in RAHM 2018, RAHM brings together the most outstanding present and future LGBT+ leaders in the world. Diarra holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Toronto.
Photographs and/or video will be taken at this event.
By taking part in this event you grant Informed Funding full rights to use the images resulting from the photography/video filming for publicity or other purposes to help achieve our aims. This might include (but is not limited to), the right to use them in printed and online publicity, social media, press releases and funding applications.
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