University of Edingburg Graduate Benjamin Benton is the 26 year old entrepreneur behind Huxley clothing, after leaving university in 2007, Benjamin secured a job working for a hedge fund in London.

He said “It was a choice between working long hours analysing spreadsheets and data in order to make other people rich and successful, or working longer hours, on my own, to get my business off the ground”. Huxley clothing was born in February 2009 with investments from friends and family.

He then added that he had the opportunity to either go with the opportunity to create a business from nothing that will one day hopefully be a successful and internationally renowned brand or working in his 9-5 job, there really was no competition in my mind for which route I should take.

Although you could argue his method in choosing the name for his business after he named his company “Huxley” after his friend’s dog, but you can’t deny his passion, dedication and commitment in turning his business into a successful one.

I do really love the look of the jumpers, very ummm…Nice, Colourful, Now I really feel like getting one.
Check out their products @ www.huxleyclothing.co.uk/shop

Nice Catalog, Right??

Chris Wickson, Alistair Lindsay, Oliver Sidwell and Ben Smith are the four co-founders that started Ratemyplacement.co.uk

The story of Ratemyplacement.co.uk began when four undergrads at university of Loughborough decided to go on placement in 05-06 as part of their degree, after finishing their placement and realising students do not have enough information before going on their placement or even finding the right placement, they decided to create RateMyPlacement.co.uk to provide students with more information about roles and organisations they were looking to apply for, to ultimately, allow them to make a more informed choice than they did.

They said the following on their website about their journey:

The Idea

The idea of RateMyPlacement was born over a few emails that were flying around whilst we were on our work placements. We found ourselves asking each other:
“If you could reapply, would you have applied for the same jobs knowing what you do now?”

After some research we found there were few other websites dedicated to work placements or internships and no other websites that allowed students or interns to rate and review their experiences.

The hardest part of bringing RateMyPlacement to life was deciding whether it was worth turning the idea into a reality. Is anyone going to bother using it? What happens if we are sued by a company who has been given a bad review by a student? Can we afford it on top of our already growing debt? After testing the idea out on our friends and Tricia Tape, the Loughborough University Placement Officer, we decided the idea may actually be useful to Loughborough students and set about making it happen.

Getting Started

The idea began to become reality after we met our website designer, Andy Higgs and were given a small amount of funding from friends and family. We had already extensively mapped out how we wished the website to look, feel and work (often a welcome break from coursework and revision!) so it was up to Andy to work his magic and turn the plans into the website you see before you (with about 12,325 developments, tweaks and improvements along the way!)

The Launch

We launched RateMyPlacement on 12th March 2007 to our friends and other students at Loughborough; within a week we had 50 reviews and 300 members.

NOW

The website is now a valuable resource for employers and future employees alike, giving greater power and freedom of choice to interns and providing a pool of skilled and motivated potential employees to recruiters.

RateMyPlacement allows students to view the latest placement and internship job vacancies and read about students’ experiences on placement, they also offer application advice and top-tips to ensure you are well equipped to helping you find and get your dream job!

If you’re thinking about going on placement, you should definitely have a look at Ratemyplacement.co.uk before you make your decision.

For quite some time now i have been meaning to talk about Andrew Thompson now known as Andrew fashion, i first stumbled across him while visiting Andrew Warner site(Mixergy) and i have to say what an amazing story of a young and stupid entrepreneur, sorry Andrew, I absolutely loved the way Andrew Warner interviews him and also his responses of giving the viewers an in-depth analysis of his journey as an entrepreneur.

This interview would not have been that great if Andrew Thompson has decided to withhold all information or just giving us a sneek of his story, for this, thank you Andrew. The Interview was very full and entertaining, i had my eyes constantly fixed on my laptop.

Andrew fashion talks about his life as an entrepreneur.

How he started a website called MySpaceSupport.com while in high school, achieving 200,000 unique visits and half a million page views per day, helping to move MySpace into a leading position in the Internet’s social networking sector.

This sounds great right?? Until when he makes a very bold and stupid move, I guess he should have done 301 redirect

He is ever so motivated to get to the top again; He started BeModel.com, a professional networking website which provides aspiring models and photographers a whole new marketplace for their skills. The website itself already had 7,000 active users and roughly 30,000 page views per day within three months of its initiation.

Andrew is currently writing a book called Young & Stupid: An Autobiography Of Andrew Fashion, i personally think everyone should get a copy of this book, or any young entrepreneur starting out in business or the entrepreneur that has just broken into $10,000 a month section or maybe more, this will definitely give you some tips on staying grounded and focused or perhaps just a reminder on why you should stay focused.

His Book: Young & Stupid: An Autobiography of Andrew Fashion

The Chapters
• Chapter 1 – The Beginning
• Chapter 2 – Computers? Internet? Video Games?
• Chapter 3 – IS2S
• Chapter 4 – The Dirty Secret
• Chapter 5 – Dropout
• Chapter 6 – Living Alone At Age 17
• Chapter 7 – My First $100,000 Check
• Chapter 8 – You Don’t Have To Be A Genius
• Chapter 9 – The Rise of Andrew Fashion
• Chapter 10 – Depression
• Chapter 11 – Rising To The Top
• Chapter 12 – To Be Determined…

Not your typical story of how a young entrepreneur made a huge load of cash and hes on his way to becoming a billionaire or something, i am not saying that is not cool, but it shows that they are entrepreneurs that get it wrong all the time and will continue to get it wrong until their mindset is right.

Check out his interview with Andrew Warner
Check out Andrew fashion’s Blog, its quite a good read also.