John's Blog » Entrepreneurship

Be Travellers

John — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 07:13:01 +0000

I’m mildly envious of an old friend’s new business venture, tours in Central Asia. I went to Malaysia all those years ago (pre Uni) with Ollie from Be Travellers and since then he’s fallen in love with Central Asia having driven through the region on an epic journey from England to Mongolia in an old Land Rover which he admits shouldn’t have made it. Now, along with his business partner they are planning to take travellers on tours, which despite their famous routes (the Silk Road) and the fact that certain countries appear weekly in the news (Afghanistan) are still not widely explored by western tourists.

It’s a pity that Central Asia is largely unexplored, the history of this region stretches back into antiquity and contains a variety of cultures, archaeological important sites and stunning scenery. Before Be Travellers I would probably have overlooked that part of the world too but their tours of Central Asia look really good, the challenge would be which one to choose.

threadjungle

John — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:31:42 +0000

Recently I’ve been starting up a business with a group of guys here in Dunedin who already own a clothing company and want to diversify their business. We’ve been working together on the new venture for a while, entering competitions, writing business plans, the usual things and with the launch of our website threadjungle.com, I thought it was high time I mentioned it on my blog.

So what is threadjungle? It’s an ecommerce platform where users can set up their own store to sell customised items without having to worry about inventory, order fulfilment, customer service, paying for an ecommerce website, etc; we’ll take care of all of that for them. Oh, and the best bit is to open up and run a store is free and always will be.

We’re (or should I say I’m) still in the process of writing the code but we already recruiting testers to open stores, our first being RetroKiwi. So unlike Twitter, we should actually have some money coming in!

Silicon Valley Speaker Series event

John — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:45:07 +0000

Tonight I went to one of the Silicon Valley Speaker Series held by the University of Edinburgh. The speaker was Randy Haykin, a venture capitalist and founding VP of marketing at Yahoo! Having been invited to these events for over a year this was my first time and I didn’t really know what to expect but Randy’s talk was really relevant to the current economic climate and how is effects he acquiring of funding. Whilst it wasn’t good news, it wasn’t all bad either. a recession is a big change to an economy that has trickle down effects on peoples day to day lives and its effects are felt in the various investment types in different ways. It was interesting to hear from someone with 12 years of experience in the industry. I have to admit to finding the whole thing fascinating. The economy is the foundation of our society and it’s interesting to see how things that seem unconnected but actually aren’t. That’s even without taking the influence of what happens in other countries into account.

Even though I’m down the equivalent of a small car on the stock market I guess I’m still largely unaffected and safe in the knowledge that that in 18 months we’ll be back to normal. At least that’s what they say, but then again Alistair Darling isn’t Mystic Meg and might just be trying to put a brave face on it. Like they say, there’s nothing to fear except fear itself.

One other thing about the change induced by a recession is the potential new opportunities. Don’t get me worng, I’m not talking about benefitting from someones missfortune, but the things that were until now more difficult. Unlike the Zimbabwaens we met at the border between their country and Zambia who said to “give it a few years”, Randy never said to shelve any plans to start a business until the recession was over. He had a few ideas about how to make the most of the economic uncertainty. For one, it’s not a recruiters market in many industries and as I discovered with with my lunchtime meeting even people in computing are willing to work only for equity in a company that doesn’t exist yet. The IT recruitment market as a whole is relativly untouched by the redundacies seen elsewhere. It seems to be an ideal time to acquire talent at a good price, especially when I’m on the market!