Founder Stories: Storify and MinuteBox

Last Friday, as part of the Imperial Entrepreneurs speaker series programme, the founders of Storify, Xavier Damman, and MinuteBox, Josh Liu, came to the Imperial Business School.

The evening kicked off with a presentation from Imperial Entrepreneurs about what they do and the set of events planned out for the year. Both speakers had fascinating stories of entrepreneurship and how they grew their businesses from scratch in uncertain times.

Xavier, who has a background in Computer Science, joined the City for one year before swiftly moving on to starting his own business. His first concept was to develop a product to help people publish stories around social media, in particular Twitter. He was bold, and moved from Brussels to Silicon Valley with his girlfriend without knowing what to expect and with only a few contacts. After six months of hard work and networking, his business, Storify, got $2 million funding from Khosla Ventures and also managed to secure a co-founder in the media industry. Xavier was juggling his time between meetings with venture capitalists and coding the product by himself.

Storify allows people to create stories around posts

His start-up, Storify, allows people and companies to create stories around posts on social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. He is passionate about the concept of sharing and how his product allows people to capture individual posts, photos and links that would otherwise have been lost in the web, and create stories around them. According to Xavier “Everybody is a reporter, but thanks to journalists, those voices can impact wide audiences, be remembered, change the world”. His aim is to reinvent storytelling with social media; to make everyone a ‘journalist’.

One tip he gives to aspiring entrepreneurs: “Don’t ask for permission; ask for forgiveness.” It is, after all, in the words of Steve Jobs, those of us who “think different ... have no respect for the status quo”, that will make a noticeable difference in this world.

The second visiting entrepreneur was Josh Liu from Minutebox. Josh is an alumni of Imperial College, and his product focuses on getting people forming contacts between specialists in certain areas of expertise. Though the first iteration of his product got some negative publicity on TechCrunch (a leading technology/start-up blog), Minutebox went on to become a succesful startup, enabling individuals to take part in live chats with professionals in various fields through looking at their LinkedIn profiles. Josh came from a working class family and fought hard to break out of it and build his own business. His biggest piece of advice from the evening was to make sure you have a great team when starting out, as these are the people who you will be spending most of your time with. Even though Josh was not a technical cofounder, it was his succesful collaboration with the team he formed that ensured the eventual success of Minutebox.

... to reinvent storytelling with social media; to make everyone a journalist

The visit from Xavier and Josh is just the first of many inspiring talks Imperial Entrepreneurs has planned. The focus of the society is to promote entrepreneurship and the idea that there are other prospects for Imperial graduates than the very tempting route toward investment banking. Imperial College represents some of the top intellect around the world, and it is just this kind of people that are able to create innovative companies of their own which generate value for society.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship, starting your own company, the technology sector, or just want to listen to some very inspiring speakers, come to the talks organised by Imperial Entrepreneurs! Sign up for the mailing list at www.imperialentrepreneurs.com