[SMed]

[FluxD]

(Original post by Smack)
From your post history in this thread the above seems like a very good description of your own university experience. Also in my experience those who are most likely to be stuck in lower paid jobs, at for the immediate few years after graduation, are those who studied arts, humanities and social sciences at Russell and 1994 Group universities, certainly not those who went to "lower" universities as they often do courses that are either directly relevant to industry or have work experience built in.

Maybe first year and part of second year. I've already started paying back student loans now less than half a year after I graduated.

Also I agree many humanities students need to up their game when it comes to career plan. Most have never even had a job in their entire lives, and many actually graduate with absolutely no work experience. Humanities departments needs to try and provide them with support and dedicate more attention to arming their students with a solid knowledge of what to expect when they graduate, and guiding them in right paths be it work placements, relevant post-graduate study or what not because not everyone is going to become a PhD student and obtain a lectureship.

Those who study a humanities and do not want to become an academic, and also who have no solid plan for a future career, are doomed from the start. Then again anyone who doesn't have a solid career plan is doomed.

[Slumpy]

(Original post by FluxD)
Most have never even had a job in their entire lives, and many actually graduate with absolutely no work experience.

This was true for me, and a few other mathematicians that I knew, so it's not limited to arts.

[GQ.]

(Original post by mituozo)
It's exactly the reason that these people don't have experience that they're so successful. The founders of most the biggest companies in the world typically had no experience in that market when they entered it. They therefore don't have an established set of preconceptions of what should/shouldn't be done and can make something truly disruptive.

Facebook is an example, Apple, Microsoft, Google, AirBnB, etc etc.

Everything you do in life you're competing against tons of people. You'll be competing against 100+ people to get a good job if it's a job worth having.

Even if you fail, starting a business and failing arguably teaches a lot more about business (and yourself/life) than most any job would. You also know where you went wrong for next time. There's a good reason that things like: http://www.thielfellowship.org/ are emerging.

The reason the UK doesn't have any of the big successful e-businesses are because of negative attitudes just like yours. How do you know until you've gone out there yourself and tried something? Over in the US they actively embrace entrepreneurship and work to maximise their success. Over here and in Europe entrepreneurs are viewed as unemployed, and the culture lends far more towards minimising failure rather than maximising success.

If I didn't bother and sat back and said "there's millions of online storage companies, what hope do I have?" back when I was 15, I'd never have had a car when I turned 17, or made more money than most teens could have dreamed of by the time they were 20. (Or will make in the next 5 years combined for that matter).. You've gotta swing for the fences and give things a shot in life. Sure you might fail, but personally I'd far rather live my life worse off financially knowing that I gave my best shot at making something for myself, enjoyed going to work mon-fri, was responsible for my own success etc than live an averagely successful middle-income life in suburbia, slave to the guy next up on the corporate ladder.

Out of curiosity how did you set up an online storage company? How does one go about getting the online storage to sell? Just curious

[made_of_fail]

(Original post by mituozo)
It's exactly the reason that these people don't have experience that they're so successful. The founders of most the biggest companies in the world typically had no experience in that market when they entered it. They therefore don't have an established set of preconceptions of what should/shouldn't be done and can make something truly disruptive.

Facebook is an example, Apple, Microsoft, Google, AirBnB, etc etc.

Everything you do in life you're competing against tons of people. You'll be competing against 100+ people to get a good job if it's a job worth having.

Even if you fail, starting a business and failing arguably teaches a lot more about business (and yourself/life) than most any job would. You also know where you went wrong for next time. There's a good reason that things like: http://www.thielfellowship.org/ are emerging.

The reason the UK doesn't have any of the big successful e-businesses are because of negative attitudes just like yours. How do you know until you've gone out there yourself and tried something? Over in the US they actively embrace entrepreneurship and work to maximise their success. Over here and in Europe entrepreneurs are viewed as unemployed, and the culture lends far more towards minimising failure rather than maximising success.

If I didn't bother and sat back and said "there's millions of online storage companies, what hope do I have?" back when I was 15, I'd never have had a car when I turned 17, or made more money than most teens could have dreamed of by the time they were 20. (Or will make in the next 5 years combined for that matter).. You've gotta swing for the fences and give things a shot in life. Sure you might fail, but personally I'd far rather live my life worse off financially knowing that I gave my best shot at making something for myself, enjoyed going to work mon-fri, was responsible for my own success etc than live an averagely successful middle-income life in suburbia, slave to the guy next up on the corporate ladder.

you're an exception; you have considerable hard earned experience in the field. most people don't have the technical background or even the basic aptitude required.

plus, pretty doubtful that we don't have any mega internet startups in the UK because of a culture of negativity. couldn't have anything to do with a relative paucity of tech talent and funding...

i'm all for people going ahead and taking risks, and i also recognise that you have little to lose at the beginning of your career. BUT, i am rarely impressed by any of these fresh out of uni startups.

out of interest, what do you see as the long term prospects of your current project?

[SMed]

Norway runs out of butter.

Nation-wide low-carb dieting.

[Monkey_Pete]

Mock exam in solicitors accounts tomorrow

Revision plan

Step 1: copy some notes into account rules book that can be taken into exam
Step 2: Start drinking
Step 3:...
Step 4: Profit

[Monkey_Pete]

(Original post by mituozo)
.

according to companies house one of your companies had a statement of capital with a value of a massive £5.56 only 2 months ago.

Have things picked up a bit since then?

[ibysaiyan]

SKYRIM TIME !

[mituozo]

(Original post by Monkey_Pete)
according to companies house one of your companies had a statement of capital with a value of a massive £5.56 only 2 months ago.

Have things picked up a bit since then?

Haha, everyone doing their little bit to pick things apart . It shows my points right at hand, rather than asking what I've done or about my successes, it's straight into trying to dig out negatives.

We setup the company as having total shares of several £1 shares totally, split between me and my father. When our first investor came on board, we couldn't issue the right number of shares to give his percentage, so broke it down to 1p shares and issued more shares.

Total share capital doesn't mean anything. (At least as far as I'm aware, someone can prove me wrong / explain exactly what it means - I'm probably not fully aware of how it all works). Your % ownership of the company is in effect the proportion of those £5.56 of shares you own. So for example say it was £5, and I owned £2 in shares, I'd own 40% of the company. That doesn't mean the company is worth £5, or that £5 is the total amount invested into the company.

(Original post by made_of_fail)
you're an exception; you have considerable hard earned experience in the field. most people don't have the technical background or even the basic aptitude required.

plus, pretty doubtful that we don't have any mega internet startups in the UK because of a culture of negativity. couldn't have anything to do with a relative paucity of tech talent and funding...

i'm all for people going ahead and taking risks, and i also recognise that you have little to lose at the beginning of your career. BUT, i am rarely impressed by any of these fresh out of uni startups.

out of interest, what do you see as the long term prospects of your current project?

We have tons of tech talent. They come straight out of university to go and work in the investment banks.

The reason there's less funding around is because of that negativity. People here aren't willing to make an investment in a company swinging for the fences. Some new venture capital firms are starting to emerge that take a more Silicon Valley style approach, and the situation in London is improving, but we're a long way away yet. The only reason why investors are starting to embrace the valley way of thinking is the successes of the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, etc though.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...e-capital.html

Is an excellent article that highlights the difference in mindset, in particular in venture capital - the whole "minimising failure" attitude we have. The mindset isn't limited to VC though, it's spread through society.

With respect to my current project - who knows. We're focussing on growth - we have several ideas we're trying in order to monetize alongside the obvious apparent from the website that'll be starting up in the new year. Our biggest hurdle is building relationships with the partners we work with. In the industry they're typically quite anti technology, but the mindset is slowly starting to change, especially with revenues down, places closing and them looking for new ways to bring in customers. (Which is basically our key purpose, to bring new customers into struggling venues through use of our services and the platform we're building).

[Motorbiker]

(Original post by mituozo)
Total share capital doesn't mean anything. (At least as far as I'm aware, someone can prove me wrong / explain exactly what it means - I'm probably not fully aware of how it all works). Your % ownership of the company is in effect the proportion of those £5.56 of shares you own. So for example say it was £5, and I owned £2 in shares, I'd own 40% of the company. That doesn't mean the company is worth £5, or that £5 is the total amount invested into the company.

Tbh i was more interested in how much you made from the sale of fileden...

That must have netted you a decent amount tbh.

You still work on that site employed by them or are you out of it completely now?

[mituozo]

(Original post by GQ.)
Out of curiosity how did you set up an online storage company? How does one go about getting the online storage to sell? Just curious

We rented servers and basically gave away space on them for free, which we supported with ads. When people used their bandwidth/storage limits up we'd encourage them to switch over to paid plans with us for more, to keep their files online. So basically:

Datacenter company owns a datacenter..
Server provider owns a rack in that datacenter, which it manages. They buy hardware (servers, routers, switches, etc) and fit it, the datacenter company sells them power and bandwidth.
The server provider packs all that stuff together, and sells individual servers onto us at a monthly rate.
We manage the software on the servers, make sure the site is online, develop the website that allows people to upload files, source advertisers, manage customer support, etc.

It's an extremely simplified view but that's how it worked in our case. You do have server providers which own entire datacenters and rent out servers individually. You can also go straight to the datacenter and rent out your own rack/space in a rack and provide your own hardware, etc etc.. It all depends on how much "hassle" you want to endure at the hardware end. I don't have any hardware experience, so entirely avoided it and let another company manage it on my behalf.

At one point we were renting over 20 servers.. Hardware's become a lot more powerful though recently, and hard disk space has increased exponentially, whilst data transfer rates over the net haven't improved at the same rate, so we managed to cut our hardware usage down a lot in the last couple of years.

(Original post by MHorman)
Tbh i was more interested in how much you made from the sale of fileden...

That must have netted you a decent amount tbh.

You still work on that site employed by them or are you out of it completely now?

It was a fair sum, but not "never have to work again" money. We had ~3 million users when it was sold..

Unfortunately I can't release the figure - it was part of a fairly complicated deal and I agreed to keep it confidential.

I don't work there anymore, I wanted out from online storage - high costs, low margins, high competition. With Dropbox in the arena, Box.net, Myspace dying, google looking to enter the market and several others I didn't see the site growing substantially more and thought the best exit would be in selling it. I think Dropbox are onto a great thing and will have the consumer market cornered.. The enterprise market is up in the air between Box.net, Huddle and such.. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the company that acquired FD do in order to try to differentiate from the big guys moving forward. They have the capital to do the things that I could never afford to with it.

This is all rather off topic anyway (if there even is a topic to this thread ) More than happy to talk to anyone a bit over PM or whatever though if anyone's interested in starting out themselves / has any questions etc.. The more people that make the leap the better, and if I can help just one person do that it'd be awesome.

[Michael XYZ]

I definitely think that a huge reason that people don't get good jobs - or a job at all - after graduating is simply because they have never thought about it.

So many people I talk to just say they have no idea what they want to do. For me, that's a little odd; since years ago I knew I wanted to get into finance - initially it was more for economics but more recently moved to trading/investment banking (possibly, more trading to be honest).

People just don't bother with internships and things like that and are really penalised for it - in my opinion. I've got a lot of clever friends who can do the academics well but they've never thought about actual jobs. Too many presume that it'll be handed to you after you graduate.

[Adidas90]

(Original post by Smack)
From your post history in this thread the above seems like a very good description of your own university experience. Also in my experience those who are most likely to be stuck in lower paid jobs, at for the immediate few years after graduation, are those who studied arts, humanities and social sciences at Russell and 1994 Group universities, certainly not those who went to "lower" universities as they often do courses that are either directly relevant to industry or have work experience built in.

u jelly cos u aint in the Russell group?

In all seriousness, despite my thread I made a while back on this topic I will say very good post. So many fukin bums down here it's unbelievable for the kind of reputation it has, you wouldn't expect it at first but it's entirely correct. That's why I like going home so much, can only tolerate lazy spoonfed head-in-the-clouds pricks who inherently shy away from any form of hard work in short bursts. People at either end of the spectrum who actually work hard and apply themselves to something whether physically in the lowest paid forms of manual labour, or through an academic route with a good career plan earn my respect. Loafers somewhere in the middle having the casual 3 year gap from real life just because they got good A levels and so thus it follows suit that they should go to "uni" cos otherwise all their mates will look down on them, real waste of money

[Michael XYZ]

Also, you guys heard about Virginia Tech? This is just plain crazy now.

[ibysaiyan]

Even though this clip is a year old.. it brought me to tears AGAIN..

PooPooing..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjnrLt3VuSM

This guy knows his ****. lol

[GQ.]

Any of you guys run smolov before?

[Becca]

(Original post by SMed)
Norway runs out of butter.

Nation-wide low-carb dieting.

This is very true and very ****ing annoying. Everyone is obsessed with low-carb, every magaznen and newspaper has low-carb headlines all the time. I just want some butter to cook with (not much, maybe use 1 250g pack every 2-3 weeks) but no. I wanted to make fudge for someone as a Christmas present, but I can't

[Powerlifter]

PMSL Just the kind of fat you want to replace carbs too!

[The Lyceum]

(Original post by Michael XYZ)
I definitely think that a huge reason that people don't get good jobs - or a job at all - after graduating is simply because they have never thought about it.

So many people I talk to just say they have no idea what they want to do. For me, that's a little odd; since years ago I knew I wanted to get into finance - initially it was more for economics but more recently moved to trading/investment banking (possibly, more trading to be honest).

People just don't bother with internships and things like that and are really penalised for it - in my opinion. I've got a lot of clever friends who can do the academics well but they've never thought about actual jobs. Too many presume that it'll be handed to you after you graduate.

This. I studied Classics, I've graduated now and am in further study, however out of my friends from last year they're split into basically three groups: Group one comprises of those with jobs in International Banking (only 3 of these) Group two of those going into Law, with training contracts (3) or aiming towards the Bar with lots of work experience, connections etc (1) and Group three are those in crap jobs/nothing (3/4)

The thing is, the ones in the good jobs (like my friend at G. Sachs.) are those who a) had a definite plan and b) aimed towards achieving that via networking and work experience.

I myself want to become an academic, yet even so I've taken the time to examine other avenues. This year I've been careful to approach/network with various big Law firms since getting a funded PhD place is nigh on impossible.

I don't know to what extent your subject/Uni (within reason...) has to bear on it compared to how much damn work someone is putting in. I agree with you 100%