Interview:
Amelia Humfress
Founder & CEO of Steer
(Keynote Speaker, Tech Night 2015)
Twitter: @teamSteer, @AmeliaHumfress
Our Keynote Speaker from Tech Night, Amelia Humfress, went from an early career in marketing at Jimmy Choo to founding her own coding school, Steer.
This came after she experienced a gap in the market for intensive yet thorough short courses, when she was looking to learn coding herself.
She had worked on print advertising, and felt drawn towards working on the digital team. This kickstarted her journey into tech — learning how to use Photoshop, then coding — and the rest is history.
Steer was voted as one of the best places to learn coding in 2014, and has some exciting plans for the future.
About Amelia
Amelia was on the CodeFirst: Girls Ones to Watch 2014, a list of 25 accomplished women in tech who are all under 25. She has been featured as an influential and promising young entrepreneur in numerous online publications, such as recently in Hiscox Business as a Small Business Star, and by The Right Stripes.
She also graduated from King’s in 2010, where she studied Geography. Having had a diverse range of creative talents, and held leadership positions throughout her education, Amelia is a formidable leading woman and an inspiration to us all.
The Interview
What’s it like being CEO of a startup?
When you start a business, it’s just you. You juggle a lot of different jobs, and you have to be really strict with your time because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that would help grow your business.
As you grow, and earn or raise the money to hire people, you offload some of that work. In a way, you’re repeatedly firing yourself — you’re hiring people to do the tasks that you were doing, or should’ve been doing!
You start spending a lot of your time on hiring, and working alongside members of your team, making sure that they have everything they need to do their best work.
Should I learn coding even if I don’t want to be a developer?
(What if I want to be a non-technical founder or co-founder?)
I’d recommend getting to grips with the basics.
It’ll help you manage your technical team and, if digital is going to be a big part of your business, it’ll help you to understand how it works.
Is coding creative?
Writing code and programming is all about solving problems, and that makes it inherently creative.
We get a lot of designers on our courses — in 2014, 35% of Front End Web Development students were designers — which shows how well suited coding is to creative minds.
The stereotype of the tech geek alone in the corner — is this true?
It’s true that there are some people in the industry that fit that description, but I think there are probably people like that in every industry!
Just look at Sophia Amoruso, the Founder of online fashion empire Nasty Gal. She’s built a $100 million business, and she doesn’t fit that stereotype at all.
How important is User Experience and Design for a startup?
Design is an amazing tool for startups to build trust with a customer.
When we’re working on design projects, we’re trying to create something that is both innovative and beautiful, and will get a user the information they need in as few clicks as possible.
The user experience always takes priority — if something looks beautiful, but doesn’t work well, you’re going to lose sales.
How did you demonstrate you were suitable for an entry-level role in marketing at Jimmy Choo?
When I left University and started looking for a job, I quickly realised that looking at job boards was only going to get me so far. I decided to try a different approach, and made a list of the companies that I thought were doing really exciting things.
Using LinkedIn, I made a list of the heads of marketing at those companies and reached out to them with a short email, asking if they needed an extra pair of hands around the office. I got lucky with Jimmy Choo — they’d never had a Marketing intern before, but had been discussing how it might be time to bring someone in on the day I emailed.
The fact that I’d sought out the right person, and got my foot in the door with them, proved that I could act on my own initiative and make things happen.
The Future
In a wave of new schemes, younger generations are getting to learn to code as part of their curriculum and getting free devices too.
How should we, as millennials, overcome being ‘behind’ them?
( e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31834927 )
I don’t think that millennials are behind younger generations. Coding only became part of the national curriculum in September 2014, and it’s only been introduced for 5–14 year-olds.
It’s going to be quite a few years before those young people are entering the workforce, so in the meantime there are going to be a lot of opportunities for millennials who can code.
What is your vision for Steer? And your plans for the company in the future?
We’re working towards being the number one place to learn to code in the world.
We’ve recently launched a one-day coding course called Introduction to Code, and we’re expanding the number of courses that we’re running in London.
We’re also working on some exciting new projects that we’ll be able to talk about very soon.
(Diana adds: Follow their blog to be the first to know!)
Top tips from her own startup journey:
1. Focus on Sales, and 2. Keep it Simple.
Amelia’s Reading List from Tech Night:
Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers — Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Thank you, Amelia, for your time, it was a pleasure to interview you and listen to you speak at Tech Night.
We were delighted and privileged to have been joined by such an engaging and accomplished speaker for Tech Week, and hope to continue to see more of you at UCL.
To find out more about Amelia and her amazing plans for Steer, visit their website, read their blog, or find them on Social Media!
https://www.steer.me/, https://www.steer.me/blog
Twitter: @AmeliaHumfress, @teamSteer
They’re also on Facebook!
Interview by Diana Lee, our Digital & PR Director ‘14–‘15.
Read about our Tech Week initiative here: http://LWUCL.me/technight
