Top 5 in The Future 500

(Photo by Emily Quinton)

I’ve been picked as one of the top 5 in the Observer newspaper’s Courvoisier The Future 500 list for 2008 (a bit of a mouthful!) I know I’m always breaking Seth Goldin’s “A blog is about the reader, not the writer” rule so apologies for the trumpet-blowing.

There’s a great article in the Observer today as part of a special insert they run each year to find “the UK’s most innovative businesss brains and creative talent” and then connect them via an online social network and series of pretty great-sounding events that they run throughout the year. I’ll scan and post the whole thing at some point soon…

Here’s what the judges, said about me:

“Enterprise is in Stefan’s blood and he’s infectiously passionate. He’s the kind of entrepreneur who wants to invent something new every day.” Claire Richards.

“Stefan is mult-entrepreneurial with incredible drive. His use of networks in Birmingham really resonated with us, as did the way he used fatherhood as an opportunity in business. Stefan could have won the competition if he’d been further down the line with his latest project.” Ed Bartlett.

Cool! Thanks

This is great news for a few reasons:

Personal risk pays off: Making the decision to focus squarely on Odadeo this year and rather than focussing on doing consultancy at 3form was a tough call to make and I’ve had my fair share of gossip and muttering about it. Anyway. This is a real confidence booster for me. If you really want to make good things happen, you have to just follow Branson’s “screw it, just do it” rule.

We’ve just launched the ‘public beta’ of Odadeo: so anyone can sign up to the site now – effectively we’ve launched it in the Observer so we should start to see a few more dads signing up I hope!

We’re about to begin approaching investors: And finally, now that we’re coming to the end of our seed funding (I took a sizeable loan to get this far) and I’ve got a beta to show for all the hard work it’s time to start speaking to potential investors to really make this fly. I’m hoping that getting connected to some really exciting people through this network could help me find the right person who’s switched onto the same things that I am and has the financial resources to make something really exciting happen these next few years. In tough economic times it’s the person who values innovation and R&D that will succeed – at least that’s what I believe.

Okay – I’d better get back to polishing the business plan!

(PS congrats to Alex from Maverick in Birmingham who’s in the list too – we worked on a neat little project for Jamie Oliver’s show on C4 that inspired some of the ideas for Odadeo and got shortlisted for an RTS award along the way too. Watch out for this guy!)

And in case you’re wondering – the image at the top is a nice bottle of 50 year old XO they gave me, but how could I possibly open it?!