King’s disruptors

We dedicated the cover of this magazine to six awesome disruptors from King’s. Find out how this diverse bunch are rocking the worlds of investment, wireless communications, media, medtech, social enterprise, healthy living and international development.

As Julie Devonshire, Director of the Entrepreneurship Institute, said in her welcome (page 4): “If we want to change the world, we need to disrupt – to challenge the status quo, to question existing methods and approaches, to think of new ways to solve problems, and to fearlessly do things differently.”

Coming from a variety of academic fields, these seven individuals have demonstrated their ability to do just that – and each of them is a real-life example that anyone can be entrepreneurial! Be inspired by their stories and learn from their experiences; then try to imagine what an entrepreneurial version of you might achieve.

Sarah Chen: The billion-dollar disruptor

Named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Sarah is a recognised speaker, commentator and adviser on venture capital, innovation and women. She founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with four other women with the aim of channelling $1bn towards women-led and gender-diverse projects, before successfully raising the capital in just nine months. Sarah studied Law LLB at King’s Dickson Poon School of Law.

Sarah tells Start! that while she aspired to become a partner at an international law firm, a meeting during an internship changed her course – one with an entrepreneur. Captivated by the business talk and impressed by the entrepreneur’s vision, Sarah realised she was more excited by the commercial side of things.

How has your career evolved from your initial aspirations?

What started as a goal to begin to address the gender venture investment gap – which we thought would take us at least a decade – was achieved in under nine months. If I were to look at the ‘form’ of my career aspiration initially, it of course looks very different in that I am not a big partner in an international law firm. But I do in fact work with amazing partners at international firms that truly are great advisers in the work I do.

My bigger vision was always to create impact at scale in the commercial world and to have a platform to help other ambitious, high-calibre women rise – and I am doing just that.

What are the most powerful lessons you’ve learned along the way?

I’ve learned to follow my gut instinct – about people I trust, deals I get into, etc.

Taking the leap is something I’ve always believed in. I always ask myself: what’s the worst that can happen? Can I start again?

I’ve discovered that people don’t really care about what you’ve done, but how you’ve made them feel.

How do you plan to continue to disrupt?

In the next five years, I’m hopeful that I can report back on moving the dial on the global gender venture investment gap – i.e. bringing the percentage invested into women-founded companies up to really fuel the innovation.

Bhavagaya Bakshi: The medtech disruptor

Dr Bakshi is Chief Executive and Co-Founder of C the Signs – an award-winning tool that uses artificial intelligence to identify patients at risk of cancer at the earliest and most curable stage of the disease. She has been a General Practitioner within the NHS, led on health policy at the British Medical Association and was Deputy IT Lead of the General Practitioners Committee. She studied Medicine at the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine and was awarded the Young Alumni Springboard Award from King’s College London in 2018.

What led to you starting your own medtech business?

My enthusiasm for medicine was compounded by the way we measure success in healthcare – not by profit margins or balance sheets, but by outcomes that would benefit all. That passion and enthusiasm led me to become a General Practitioner, and now CEO of C the Signs.

C the Signs was born with a clear purpose: to reimagine a future where everyone lives, by creating a technology that can digitally screen patients to identify those at risk of cancer to ensure the greatest chances of survival.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

The most challenging moments are knowing that there is still a long way to go in order to realise that future in which everyone lives following their diagnosis. But it is a challenge that we are relishing for the sake of patients and their families. Early on I learnt that there is no set path to success: only the one you carve for yourself. Taking risks has been core to this – to innovate, iterate and learn constantly.

How are you adapting to lockdown measures in order to continue your work?

We have mobilised a COVID-19 Cancer Hub, working with charities to support cancer patients. We have also deployed C the Signs remotely across the NHS, to improve identification and streamline the diagnosis for patients at risk of cancer.

Devika Wood: The social-purpose disruptor

Winner of the King’s 2019 Alumni Entrepreneur Award, Devika is the CoFounder of tech-enabled care provider Vida. After capturing investor attention to the tune of £2.7m, she moved on to launch her second venture, Iamarla.com – a social enterprise supporting women who have experienced abuse, trauma or discrimination. She also works as Head of Acceleration and Partnerships at Telefónica’s tech accelerator Wayra. Devika studied Human Biology at King’s College London.

What are your top tips to a student who isn’t sure what they want to do?

What you do at 21 and what you do at 29 will be so different! I have been a carer for my grandmother, worked in research, in hospitals and in tech. These collective experiences opened up my eyes to how technology could change healthcare, and I developed my own digital health solution for elderly people.

Take time to explore what motivates you; be open-minded. Passion and love for what you do is key. And remember, authenticity builds relationships, and relationships build opportunities.

Reflecting back to when you were a student, are you where you thought you’d be today?

Being an entrepreneur is an unknown role, not a set-in-stone career. I had a ‘sink or swim’ feeling, but I also discovered skills I never thought I had! At university, I wouldn’t have recognised where I am or what I’m doing now. Today, people call me a success; that is still strange for me.

Alex Lai: The thirst-quenching disruptor

After securing a First-Class Honours degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Department of Engineering, Alex went on to work at Fujitsu and BNP Paribas after graduating. However, eager to be his own boss and work across all aspects of a business, he quit his City job to launch a health-drink company, Raylex. Now his range of aloe and CBD-infused beverages can be found on the shelves of Sainsbury’s and Wasabi, and turns over £10m a year.

Tell us how you went from studying Engineering to being an entrepreneur?

I was lucky enough to get an internship at BNP Paribas and ended up there for about four years doing trading and sales. I really enjoyed it and it got me learning quite a lot about how markets work and how to sell. But my parents have always run a family restaurant business – they immigrated from Hong Kong years ago and have run their own business ever since – and that made me want to do something on my own.

We started with a couple of different ideas; we saw coconut water and smoothies really taking off back in 2014. Aloe was quite a normal drink to me because you could buy it in Chinese supermarkets, but you could never buy it in a normal chiller next to coconut water, and that got me thinking. So we had a core idea that we believed in, then we pivoted and pivoted and, eventually, it snowballed into this business!

Are graduate entrepreneurs a growing trend?

Nowadays, rather than finding a job, you can create your own, which I find incredible. But you need to be willing to put in the work, and you also need an idea.

Chris Coghlan: The micro-entrepreneur disruptor

Chris studied War Studies at the School of Security Studies. Inspired by his grandfather, who fought the Nazis, he wanted to be a soldier. However, an injury put his military plans on hold – so he built a career as a Hedge Fund Manager in the City. Then, frustrated by the ineffectiveness of current methods to tackle poverty in the developing world – together with Violet Busingye (a former Rwandan refugee) – he launched the charity Grow Movement.

Can you tell us how you’ve navigated your career path?

During my first summer at King’s, I travelled to Mozambique where I met a boy named Tiago, who’d lost his mother in the civil war. I recognised his anger, having lost my own mother as a child – which gave me a passion to use the pain from things you cannot change, to change the things you can. So I founded Grow Movement: a charity with a mission to alleviate poverty by engaging remote volunteer consultants to transfer business skills to Africa’s entrepreneurs.

After 10 years trying, I overcame my injury, learnt to run again and rejoined the Army Reserve. At the same time, the idea for Grow Movement came to me – so I quit my job as a Hedge Fund Manager and launched the charity. I’m incredibly proud that over the last decade, Grow Movement has improved the lives of more than 50,000 people. And I’m incredibly proud that I’ve served as a British Diplomat and Soldier, just like my grandfather, against ISIS.

What’s been the highlight of your eclectic career?

I’ve really benefited in my career from a strong sense of purpose and being opportunistic and resilient.

London, Stanford, and Chicago Booth Business Schools spent three years doing a randomised control trial on 900 of our micro-entrepreneurs in Uganda, and found that our method increases our entrepreneurs’ sales by a quarter, which featured in The Economist. It is my career highlight because it showed it had all been worth it; that I had changed the things I could.

What’s your next challenge?

Now that we’ve proven remote volunteer consulting as an effective method of international poverty relief, I’m exploring how to use it to have impact at scale.

Mischa Dohler: The wireless communications disruptor

Part of the first team to build a fully functional 5G system in the UK, Mischa is a Professor in Wireless Communications at King’s, driving cross-disciplinary research and innovation in technology, sciences and arts. A serial entrepreneur, he has launched five companies. He is also a composer and pianist with five albums on Spotify/iTunes, and is fluent in six languages. He studied Physics at Moscow State University.

Your CV is very impressive – have you got a guiding principle or mantra?

Yes: my dad taught me that everything you learn will be somehow useful to you at some point in life. So if I can learn something, I give it a shot, because there will be a moment when it can be applied – maybe it’s not useful to me right now, but there will be a time. My career has also been steered by my desire to give soul to technology.

What has given you the greatest sense of accomplishment?

When I was working at France Telecom in 2005, I co-founded the Internet of Things industry standards group, which essentially became the industry standards group globally. Seeing that grow has been phenomenal.

More recently, I launched my fifth piano album in Los Angeles, where I played in front of 4,000 people, and then combined it with a Keynote on 5G and the Internet of Skills. That was a real highlight!

What are you working on next?

The Internet of Skills (IoS): the new generation of the internet. Beyond transmitting things like audio or video, it can transmit touch and feel and muscle movements. With the COVID-19 crisis, this has become a really hot topic, because imagine if we had this now fully up and running? We could literally execute skills remotely!

Tobi Oredein: The multimedia disruptor

Fuelled by her passion for journalism, Tobi interned at many women’s lifestyle magazines after studying American Studies at King’s. Her experiences have led to her thriving as a progressive leader, influential TEDX speaker, Forbes 30 Under 30 businesswoman (2018), and becoming CEO, Editor and Co-Founder of Black Ballad – a black lifestyle media company for Black British women by Black British women, founded with her husband Bola Awoniyi.

What makes an American Studies graduate want to start her own business?

During my internships, I got fed up with lifestyle magazines claiming to be ‘the best magazine for women in Britain’. They meant white women. As a Black British, Black African woman, if I wanted to read about black female experiences, I had to read Black American magazines, because there were no publications catering for me.

Journalism can be a very insidious industry and difficult to break into. After many rejections, I realised that if no one was going to take a chance on me, I had to take a chance on myself and create my own future. That is how Black Ballad was born – out of frustration and an underserved audience.

How did you fund Black Ballad?

As a black female founder, I knew our chances of getting investment were <0.2% (British Business Bank, 2017), so we learnt to be very prudent.

Bola was instrumental in designing a revenue-generating membership model early on, but we only spent when it was critical and learnt how to do everything else ourselves. Eventually we crowdfunded, which really pushed us – it’s more difficult than people think! Now we are raising an investment round and people looking at our financials criticise us for not spending enough! We must unlearn the habit of being too thrifty.

What are your top financial tips for start-ups?

1. Save as much as possible before launching a business.

2. Spend conservatively so you can afford high quality, business-critical purchases.

3. Avoid unnecessary expenditure by negotiating mutually beneficial partnerships.

4. When fundraising, ‘Date your investor’ The process of getting investment is like dating. You ‘date’ your investor and get to know them because they might join your business family. Go on dates to make sure the right person gets to invest in your company.