Myra Leung reflects on Future of Finance 2021 Conference's Business & Entrepreneurship Panel.
Hosted by 6 of the LARGEST careers societies from leading global universities, Future of Finance 2021 was organised by UCL FinTech Society, LSE SU FinTech Society, LSE PRIS, Imperial Finance Society, Warwick Entrepreneurs Society & King's Business Club.
The speakers
Simon King-Cline, Founder, Aspect Communications
Simon King-Cline is the Founder and Owner of Aspect Event & Communications, an award-winning events agency. He founded the website theupside.biz and works as a business mentor and inspiration speaker as well.
Jules Becci-Morin de la Rivière, Founder & CEO, Insula Investment Management
Jules Becci-Morin de la Riviére founded and leads the company Insula Investment Management, which is a cryptocurrency investment management software suite. He is a King’s College London alumnus.
Amr Shaker, Business Coach
Amr Shaker is working as a Business Coach, at his own company named Amr Shaker, which he founded and built up himself.
The panel
In this Business & Entrepreneurship panel, Simon, Jules and Amr talked about their own experience in founding their businesses, how they dealt with the challenges they faced and the key skills and advice for students seeking to start their business.
Motivation of Entrepreneurship
The session begins with each speaker introducing their own journey. Simon, the owner of a multimillion pound business Aspect Communication, started off his introduction with a critical point of entrepreneurship -- motivation to start a business. He worked at the banking industry after graduation and left after realising it was not where his passion lies. He then worked in the creative and communication industry which he enjoyed but he noticed he was growing the business for someone else when he could have done it on his own. That was when entrepreneurship came into his life. He stated, “The motivation to start my business was, I didn’t want to earn money for other people, and more to that, we turned down all the investment from others because we want absolute control.”.
Entrepreneurship Mindset
As a business coach, Amr gives a very inspirational speech on the importance of having the correct entrepreneurial mindset. From being an engineer, to a business man and turning into a business coach which people ask him for advice, he stated that it is important to “Test and learn”. Entrepreneurs are people who “see the world in a different way than most other people. They see opportunity when others see problems. They believe in themselves.” He identifies the three main elements for starting a business successfully are “identifying a need, taking action and being resilient to overcome all the challenges”. Entrepreneurs need to adapt to what is going on and always prepare to scale up and scale down. Failing is a necessary process to learn from while scaling up can also be a risk if a business is growing too fast. “You test, then you learn. When you test to learn, you know the price you pay”.
How to get started as a university student
Jules, who is only 24, provides a very different point of view as a younger-generation entrepreneur. He started his own cryptocurrency fund when he was studying in which he was introduced to cryptocurrency in the context of finance when he worked in an investment fund for his internship. He stated that “As a university student, there would be a period of looking for what to do, reviewing your experience and mapping out your interests would help you decide”. He encourages students to do internships to expose themselves to various opportunities. Speaking from his own experience, he suggested that “when you're skeptical, you need to get moving and take action”. This was his initial faith in creating “Insula Investment'' which “Insula” is a zone in the brain responsible for emotions where when you are held back because of fear, it's mostly your insula speaking and you need to get started.
The discussion really inspired me to have a strong faith in myself and take actions to test and find my own path. All speakers have a strong passion in their business and worked their way towards their goals. As a university student, it is now the best time to explore, learn and build critical soft skills of “persuasion, presentation, negotiation, networking” for the future.
To learn more about Simon, read his exclusive pre-Conference interview with FTR here.
To learn more about Jules and Insula Investment Management, read his exclusive pre-Conference interview with FTR here.
To learn more about Amr Shaker, read his exclusive pre-Conference interview with FTR here.
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