Today I am chatting with Stephen Allott, a Trinity College Cambridge Graduate, who began his eclectic career in entrepreneurship importing bicycle locks while at law school. Plotting his “great escape”, he veered into the technological space, and introduced web processing and online legal databases into chambers in the UK.    He has worked at McKinsey as a strategy consultant solving complex business problems, and has scaled network management software company Micromuse to 800 employees, taking it to IPO on NASDAQ.   No doubt having lead a highly successful entrepreneurial career, he is now a venture partner at Seedcamp, a venture capital fund with 4 unicorns to its name. He has an incredible breath of experience and has scaled companies, built teams and solved complex problems across areas as varied as sales funnels to fundraising to organisational design to corporate strategy.   This episode is simultaneously enlightening, impressive and funny.   In this episode you will learn about: 

• How to scale a company
• The one skill that work wonders for you in business
• Why the tech space is so important
• The future of technology
• How to recruit great talent
• What makes a good salesperson
• And so much more…

  Follow Stephen’s Work!

• Seedcamp: www.seedcamp.com
• Sales Tales: https://medium.com/@stephenallott

  Stephen also set up a non-profit called Cambridge Ring to back companies started by Cambridge University Computer Science and Technology graduates. He spent three years setting this up pro bono as a passion project.   It’s massively underestimated. The market capitalisation of their Hall of Fame is about $30 billion.    Some of its greatest successes include DeepMind Technologies, which was bought by Google, Raspberry Pi, and ARM, which is the most common chip architecture in the world.   You can check it out here: https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/ring   Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yasminarte/   I conducted this interview on behalf of CUE (Cambridge University Entrepreneurs)

• You can check them out here: https://www.cue.org.uk/ 

  Edited by the wonderful Jake Babineau. You could say he’s an audio genie. He’s also a great musician with a crazy podcastable voice — he composed my intro!

• Check him out on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jake_babineau/
• Music taken from the ending of his song ‘On The Cold Tile Floor’: https://bit.ly/2KQGZhN