Our CEO Part of the Top25 under 25 !

Published in

Feral Horses | Blog

5 min readNov 23, 2018

by the London Tech Advocates

Francesco Bellanca, CEO of Feral Horses — Top 25 under 25 by London Tech Advocated

We are thrilled to share our latest amazing new with you: our CEO Francesco Bellanca was selected by the Tech London Advocates for the top 25 under 25, “highlighting the best and brightest of the UK’s next generation of tech talent”, how exciting is that?! This selection has launched its very first edition this year and Feral horses is more excited than ever to be part of the game!

What is Tech London Advocates?

The huge network (free and open to join) consists in more than 6,000 tech leaders, experts and entrepreneurs based in London, across the UK and in more the 50 other countries all over the world. The network, part of Global Tech Advocates (the global group of advocates), truly believe that “London is one of the world’s leading tech hubs”.

As explain by Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates:

“The idea came (…) when I was invited to join the Tech City Advisory Group [now known as Tech City UK], and I was sitting in some of those meetings and seeing what the Greater London Authority was doing and thinking: ‘Wow, our government is doing great things to promote technology. But I didn’t really see anybody coming together to say: ‘This is a group to represent the broad tech ecosystem.’ So that was the idea.”

What was the conference all about?

Russ Shaw initially started by explaining some basic rules of the TLA:

“Use TLA as a resource when speaking, blogging and tweeting about tech (and use the TLA website and newsletters as a resource, too)
Introduce at least one new Advocate (borrowed from my Skype days; I am a big believer in ‘network effects’)
Help one another for the ‘greater good’ — let’s build a vibrant tech sector and connect London tech into other tech hubs globally”

He added that if Advocates are interested in spending more time together, there are many more groups focusing on different subjects such as CreativeTech, Women in Tech, Immigration or also TLA groups based on geography, connecting London Tech to China, India or Africa.

Then, Russ Shaw explained how TLA works and what are the main topics discussed during these events. The group is brought together twice a year pointing out critical topics and urgent issues. Just to cite a few of them, the 2014 conference focused on digital skills and education while in 2015, the main topic was London’s infrastructure. In April 2018 (5-year anniversary of TLA!), the discussion focused on the Future of London Tech. Reports are released at the end of each of these conferences.

It has also been explained how TLA takes concrete actions, such as writing letters to the Immigration Minister requesting to increase the annual allocation of Tier2 Visas.

Interviews of Russ Shaw can be found here:

What Trump immigration policies mean for Tech

Tech London Advocates founder on London Tech scene

Google expands Europe Startup fund

Russ Shaw: The Man on a Mission to turn London into the World-Beating home of Tech

Tech companies selected

The variety of fields listed below is quite impressive and they are all worth digging into! To cite only a few: Encore, a cool booking marketplace for musicians, Wegym, a crowd-sourced personal trainer platform, Headstart, an app for graduate recruitment or last but not least, Hackerfemo, running coding and business workshops (wow), founded by Femi Owolade-Coombes, 12 years old (double — wow).

Also, we would like to use the opportunity to thank again Tech London Advocates for the amazing experience they offered us by meeting in person all these young talents, and we are so proud to be part of them!