Warwick University and UCL held a joint event focused on entrepreneurship. It was held in the 17th floor of The Shard, the iconic building in London’s skyline. It was my first time in there, and it was an impressive conference suite!
Approximately 70 students were in attendance, most of which were UCL students. The event featured a lineup of panel speakers and a special guest from Google Deepmind Analytics.
The panel speakers were all student who went into entrepreneurship immediately after graduation. Most of which are currently in incubators. Some interesting insights were taken away here: a speaker mentioned she was working at a manufacturing company packing boxes, and she’d complain to her dad she was underutilizing her degree. Her father replied, “When you are running a company, you want everyone to be happy to work there, even the cleaners.” The idea being, it’s important to take in the bigger picture, maintaining positivity, and always do a good job in your work, no matter the rank. It served her well, as she was later moved to a management and logistics position.
The keynote speaker was from Deepmind Analytics, later acquired by Google. She gave an interesting speech on the work of her company, mostly about machine learning and AI. Most notable was their algorithm playing Atari’s Breakout. Link to YouTube video is here. She ended off by chatting about her career trajectory. Like always, it was non-linear and filled with ups and downs. She originally started out as a marine biologist, later self-teaching programming and a series of steps that lead to her being at Google.
Overall, it was a pretty decent event. Being up in The Shard was especially cool. There was unlimited beer and wine, and multiple rounds of hors d’oeuvres.
