Floreat – 2014
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FLOREATMAGDALENA The Magazine for Magdalen Members Magdalen Entrepreneurs Library Work Underway The Great War ISSUE 13 | 2014 Your Legacy Your Opportunity Help us to provide an outstanding educational Your Will is your opportunity to provide for your family, friends and those organizations experience for generations that have influenced and shaped your life. to come. For most people it is the one opportunity they will have to make a significant financial contribution to those people and causes that they care deeply for. If you believe that you benefitted from your time at Magdalen and After your family and friends, please you would like future generations to share consider remembering Magdalen College your experience, perhaps you might consider in your Will. including Magdalen in your Will. A gift in your Will is the one gift that For further information please everyone can make. It is your chance to contact Marilyn Bowler in the Magdalen add to a long tradition of generosity of previous generations for the benefit of future College Development Office on generations. In addition, a gift in your Will can +44 (0) 1865 286682 or email to: be a very tax efficient method of supporting [email protected] Magdalen, while at the same time lowering your Inheritance Tax liability. If you would like information on including Magdalen in your will, or you would like to discuss in confidence, and without obligation, how a gift in your Will can benefit Magdalen and its students please contact Marilyn Bowler in the College’s Development Office. +44 1865 286796 [email protected] FLOREAT MAGDALENA • THE MAGAZINE FOR MAGDALEN MEMBERS • ISSUE 13/ 2014 From the President Welcome to the 2014 issue of Floreat Magdalena with news from the College and the wider alumni community. Magdalen acts as a springboard for a huge variety of careers, and this issue celebrates Magdalen entrepreneurship from alumni, Fellows and current students. With articles from serial entrepreneur CONTENTS Luke Johnson (1980), David Soskin (1972) of Cheapflights, Keith Hanna (1983) who developed Eyelock iris-recognition software, Alumni Entrepreneurship 2 – 8 and Pete Flint (1993), founder of leading US property website Trulia, our alumni are taking advantage of the internet to change the Student Entrepreneurship 9 way we do things. In addition Magdalen is proud to have co-founded Fellow Entrepreneurship 10 the Oxford Science Park (www.oxfordsp.com) as a unique business location, offering office or laboratory space, meeting rooms and New Law Fellowship 11 conference facilities to further the business of science. Telethon 11 The New Library redevelopment work has now begun, the first New Library Redevelopment 12 – 13 major building programme on the College site since the construction Women’s Network 14 of the Grove Quad in the 1990s, and Longwall Quad will be a building site until the work is completed in Spring 2016.The project College Women 15 is long overdue – little has changed since the New Library opened in The Great War 16 – 17 1932, and various plans for its improvement have been discussed since the 1970s. Once completed the building will provide a space Alumni Events 18 – 19 which befits a College of Magdalen’s reputation for academic Oliver Wrong 20 excellence. We have raised over £5m of the more than £10m cost from a small number of generous alumni, with a further £3m being Magdalen Poetry 21 provided by the College’s own funds. We need to raise a further £2 Forthcoming Events 22 million, and we look forward to telling you more about the project over the coming months, and the opportunities for becoming part of Magdalen history by supporting this significant development. You should have started receiving our regular e-newsletters from the Development Office, keeping you updated with College and alumni news and events throughout the year. This summer we will also be launching our secure alumni web pages, which will provide a searchable online directory of members and an online event booking facility among other things, which should make it easier for you to keep in touch with us and each other. With so many ways to stay in touch with Magdalen we hope you feel like a member for life, and we look forward to seeing you back in College or at an event where you are soon. Floreat Magdalena! The President Professor David Clary FRS Design: www.harveygraphic.co.uk 1 Alumni Entrepreneurship Cheapflights (now Momondo): flight price comparison website David Soskin (1972) was bubble”. My friends extended the same CEO of Cheapflights and is sympathy towards me as a Non-Executive Director they would have shown to one who had caught of mySupermarket amongst bubonic plague. other companies. Anyway, I persevered. The My conversion to digital Cheapflights business model entrepreneurship began when I proved very robust and I attended a lecture given by the remained as CEO whilst the inventor of the financial spreadsheet, company grew exponentially Dan Bricklin, back in 1994, around and profitably. Stepping the time that the first commercial down as CEO in 2008, I have website launched in California. Dan remained on the board since. predicted that the worldwide web Following the company’s (or “information super highway” as takeover of Momondo, we it was then named) would transform have renamed Cheapflights the world. I was hooked. By the end of “the Momondo Group”. We that decade, I was actively seeking out now operate in countries all exciting internet businesses in which to over the world and, unusually invest. for a British internet company, we have British bank whose digital presence is built a substantial presence in the USA. core because it has no branches. In 2006, And then I came across Cheapflights, My book “Net Profit: How to succeed I co-founded an investment fund called a business based in an attic in in Digital Business” (John Wiley) is Howzat Partners which invests in early Wandsworth, South London. based on my experience of running stage digital businesses on both sides of Cheapflights, founded in 1996, was Cheapflights. the Atlantic. One of our investments is the very first flight price comparison Academia.edu, the world’s largest social website. I liked it so much that I decided Since 2008, I have added a few network for academics. At the time of not only to invest in it but to run it other board positions to Momondo. writing, over ten million academics have too. My timing was a bit inauspicious These include mySupermarket, the signed up. as, the week after the Cheapflights supermarket price comparison site buy-in was completed, the technology and Cortexica, a world leader in visual What, dear reader, is a graduate of market collapsed in what has become search technology. I have also served on modern history doing in the technology known as the bursting of the “internet the board of Aldermore, the fast-growing world? Well, Oxford arts graduates don’t fare too badly in the tech sphere: both Cheapflights and Academia were founded by Oxford arts graduates, the latter whilst he was a Fellow at All Souls! The success of Oxford in general – and Magdalen in particular - lies not in its effectiveness to train technicians but in its ability to nurture the development of mental rigour. And at the heart of this success is the tutorial system which allows for challenge and debate. Tutorials teach you independence of thought: you have to be prepared, to think carefully, to face some daunting challenges, to stand your ground and not to wilt in the face of criticism. As an entrepreneur, you will have a dream and then face plenty of people who will say, “Your dream will never become reality”. So you need to be clear and convinced in your mind that your dream can become reality and be able to persuade investors, customers and colleagues of this. The Dreaming Spires provide an ideal grounding for entrepreneurship. 2 FLOREAT MAGDALENA • THE MAGAZINE FOR MAGDALEN MEMBERS • ISSUE 13/ 2014 Luke Johnson: serial entrepreneur ENTREPRENEURSHIP ALUMNI Luke Johnson (1980)’s The defining moment in my career For the last 14 years I have run a niche entrepreneurial career has came in 1993 when we took control development capital shop called Risk included the expansion of of the restaurant chain PizzaExpress Capital Partners. We have backed and floated it. I served as Chairman. firms in industries including car park Pizza Express, Strada, Giraffe The shares went from 40p to 900p over equipment, tile retailing, bingo, online and Patisserie Valerie, as well the next six years and we grew the travel and artisan baking. Separately business to over 150 branches from just I served as chairman of Channel 4 as six years as chairman of 12 owned restaurants. Following that Television for six years until 2010, Channel 4. He now runs Risk success I also became a director and and coming full circle, now chair The Capital Partners and chairs the part-owner in a number of other firms. Institute of Cancer Research. Even this medical charity has an entrepreneurial Institute of Cancer Research. In the late 1990s I bought London fine element: it currently derives more dining restaurants The Ivy and Le annual IP income from its drug My career as an entrepreneur started Caprice and re-launched J Sheekey’s. discoveries than both Oxford and at Magdalen in 1980. I was a first-year I also co-founded the restaurant Cambridge combined. medic, and spending much of my time concept Strada and grew it to 35 throwing riotous parties. The Dean restaurants before selling it. In 1996 at the time did not approve of our I co-founded a chain of dentist I have written a weekly festivities, and threatened to send me surgeries called Integrated Dental down if I continued.