Name: Start-up millionaire on the event that changed her life | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2022-04-25T02:51:55.000Z
Duration: 4 min 25 s
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Gerund

So one of the great things about being an entrepreneur

Modal verbs - A2

is that you don't have to pretend to be someone you're not.

You can build the culture around things that you care about,

You don't have to pretend to be a suit in an office.

The funny thing is that I don't really feel very successful.

I know I've been lucky to build a company,

and that company got sold for a lot of money.

But in my own head, I still beat myself up and I think,

"Come on! You haven't actually contributed something to the world.

You've got to do something that's more meaningful,

make sure we don't screw up the next 10, 20 years."

if you can make sure that you channel it in a positive way

and not something that whirs away in your head

Lastminute.com was really one of the first e-commerce companies in Europe.

Isn't there an awful lot of pressure on you now?

but it's no worse than it's been for the last couple of years.

is part of how you market and communicate.

But if I look back, I think I put myself out there a bit too much.

and our share price went from £5.35 to about 19p

I got 3,000 letters from people writing to me

telling me I was an awful person for taking their money.

and I was naive a bit in thinking we could attract all this attention

build things around the values that you have,

So in 2004, I just left my company, Lastminute.com,

And I was in Morocco with my new boyfriend

I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, we skidded off the road.

I had to then spend pretty much the next two years in hospital,

and the next probably two years after that

recovering from that cataclysmically bad event.

I was pretty out of it for a long time in hospital

but I had decided I was going to start another business

before I had the accident, called Lucky Voice.

and the guy I was going to start the business with

and start showing me kind of designs and drawings,

and I don't really remember anything that I said to him.

But it actually was pretty important for me

but at the same time you want to get your brain back a bit too.

And I didn't want to be slowly wasting away,

just focusing on whether I could stand up.

I'd built an online e-commerce business -

pretty much the most techy thing you could do,

and then all of a sudden it's building bars in the real world.

But I think being imaginative in how you build your life

and your career is really rewarding and actually quite important

in terms of how we build resilience as human beings.

I am the worst karaoke singer you can possibly imagine.

I pick things which you can't really massacre,

and now post the accident I often sing Elton John, I'm Still Standing,

Inspiration and things can come from all kinds of surprising places.

I've never really had a plan, don't tell anyone.

But I would really urge you to be open-minded

about how you build your career and about opportunities.

So always take the call, always be opportunistic, always be open-minded,

and don't feel like you have to have a set way of doing things.

The incredible thing about being an entrepreneur

is that you see how quickly things can change

You don't have to be the person doing the coding,

you can be the person working in any aspect of technology.

because it can help us solve the big problems.

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Start-up millionaire on the event that changed her life | BBC Ideas

incredible

obvious

pretend

entrepreneur