'One of the great stories of the past 4/5 years. Thoroughly enjoyable.'
Vantis
WIKIPEDIA
BIOGRAPHY
Brent Hoberman shot to fame as one of the bright young faces of the 'dot-com' boom, when he co-founded lastminute.com. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Brent's venture survived when the bubble burst and has gone from strength to strength.
Operating across multiple markets, lastminute.com has established approximately 13,600 supplier relationships and over 10 million subscribers. It also owns a number of online brands, including holidayautos.com and travelprice.com. By the time it was sold to Sabre, the company was valued at $1.1bn.
Before lastminute.com, Brent was a Senior Associate at Spectrum Strategy, a media and telecoms consultancy. He then held business development responsibilities at Line One, British Telecom and United News & Media, and was also one of the founding team of the online auction site, QXL.com.
A prolific entrepreneur, Brent went on to establish another VC-backed site, mydeco.com, which provides interior design advice and furniture retail. He then took up the post of chairman of Wayn.com, a travel and leisure social network with over 10 million members. As an angel investor, Brent has backed a number of other startups including moveme.com (house moving), viagogo (tickets), t5m (celebrity channel), imagini.net (dating) and wigadoo.com (social events). With all that, he still finds time to be a Governor of London's University of the Arts College, and a non-executive board director of the Guardian Media Group.
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TOPICS
Customer Service & CRM, Retailing, IT & Online Business
SPEECH TITLES
Building an online business
Focus on service
Who buys online?
FEE BANDS
CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
£10K TO £25K
Q&A
JLA: How do you retain and motivate key staff when times are tough?
BH: To be successful requires passion. I want to find and cultivate people with similar ambitions, aspirations and visions. More than anything I want everyone pulling together. We all relish the underdog tag; the sense that we can and will prevail.
JLA: How would you describe the entrepreneur's attitude to risk?
BH: To be an entrepreneur, you have to be an optimist - in a way you undervalue the risk. A successful entrepreneur will make mistakes, and learn from them. As an online company we have the opportunity for instant feedback from our users. The risks involved online are possibly less than with a bricks and mortar company. Established businesses are structured not to take risks.