ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR
ENTREPRENEURSHIP has hogged the political limelight over the last year. David Cameron called on the nation’s “doers and grafters” to “roll up their sleeves” and fix our broken economy. The companies on our list have been pushing ahead, creating the jobs and wealth we desperately need. We are all the winners from their enterprise.
We’ve chosen one publicly-quoted retailer, Asos, and two firms, Lovefilm and Tweetdeck, that have been bought out during the year. Mind Candy and Spotify make up the list.
SIMON CALVER
LOVEFILM
Chief executive Simon Calver kept his job when LoveFilm was bought out by Amazon in January this year for £200m. The deal saw Amazon snap up the remaining 58 per cent of the company that it didn’t already own. LoveFilm is keen to expand its digital streaming operations, which are understood to represent roughly 20 per cent of its movie consumption. Amazon’s extensive studio relations and powerful cloud computing tools will be a boon for LoveFilm as digital streaming accelerates with the growing popularity of internet TV. Already, LoveFilm has struck new streaming deals with Disney in the UK and Germany. The company has more than 1.4m members and a catalogue of over 67,000 films and games.
DANIEL EK SPOTIFY
Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify alongside Martin Lorentzon, raised $100m (£61m) in a funding round last week. The Swedish music streaming company launched in 2008 and moved its commercial team to London in 2010. It has now been valued at $1bn ahead of its US expansion, which could begin as soon as 5 July. The company’s launch in the States has been long anticipated, and the new funding follows a successful licensing negotiation with Universal Music, although talks with Warner Music continue. There are also rumours of deeper integration with Facebook in the future. The service currently offers online access to millions of music tracks, either ad-supported, or by premium subscriptions. It has over 10m users in Europe.
NICK ROBERTSON
ASOS
Nick Robertson’s Aim-listed fashion innovator has come a long way since it was founded in 2000 by Robertson and his business partner Quentin Griffiths. Asos stands for “as seen on screen” and the online retailer helps customers to capture the looks of the stars on a budget, with own-brand items and bargains on major labels. Now the third most visited fashion site globally, June results showed a 41 per cent rise in year on year profit, with an underlying net profit of £28.6m. International expansion is expected to drive sales to £1bn by 2015. Its share price has trebled over the past year and although its stock is seen as overvalued by some, Asos has a shot at becoming the “Facebook of fashion” in the words of a Morgan Stanley analyst.
IAIN DODSWORTH
TWEETDECK
London-based TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth became an overnight millionaire last month after selling the firm to Twitter for around $40m (£25m) in cash and shares. Dodsworth, who founded TweetDeck in 2008, has said that he will continue to head up TweetDeck within Twitter. Dodsworth, a former developer for BSkyB and Prudential Financial, founded the company in 2008 and grew it into a team of fifteen with millions of devoted users. It was the first non-US company to be featured by Google on its Chrome internet browser application store. TweetDeck is a third-party app designed to integrate with Twitter. TweetDeck organises Twitter and other social media feeds into easy to navigate columns and filters conversations based on keywords and groups, while allowing users to write tweets in excess of the default 140-character limit through a service called Deck.ly.
MICHAEL ACTON SMITH
MIND CANDY
Michael Acton Smith founded the multiplayer games company Mind Candy in 2003, after getting his entrepreneurial career off to a good start by creating online retailer hotbox.co.uk, later firebox.com, in the 1990s.
In 2008, Mind Candy released Moshi Monsters, a website designed with children in mind. It combines gameplay (caring for a pet monster) with social networking in a secure, child-friendly space. It caught on spectacularly; Mind Candy is now one of the world’s fastest-growing online games companies, with a global fanbase. On 6 June, registered users were announced to have topped 50m, and a new monster is adopted every second. Mind Candy is now using licensing deals to extend the brand. Gross revenues around £60m are estimated for 2011, thanks to monthly subscriptions and merchandise sales.