A New Era.
The Eleven’s Ten Year Plan.
Back in 2006, I founded The Eleven with my best mate Ben.
Over the last eight years, we’ve been on a crazy adventure, from sweaty teenage club nights to the marketing agency game via a myriad of other exploits, not to mention a precarious stint through university. We’ve wound up in Shoreditch, having picked up twenty-odd other heroes along the way, and built three businesses we’re immensely proud of.
Through all the hard graft and the luck, the brimming confidence and the crippling self doubt, the glorious wins and the painstaking screw ups…. there’ve been more highs and lows than a return coach from Glastonbury. It’s been exhilarating and exhausting and we’ve loved every minute of it.
We’ve written the whole story in a separate post, so you can dive into the details if that takes your fancy…
Along the way we’ve learnt an enormous amount — about ourselves, about business and about building companies. We’ve learnt that brilliant people are absolutely, categorically and unequivocally everything. We’ve learnt that great ideas are worthless without the flawless execution that can bring them to life. We’ve learnt that the thrill of making something out of nothing, building companies from the ground up, isn’t just our passion but an absolute obsession. To do it all with my best mate is a privilege.
With our 25th birthdays round the corner, we’re crazy excited to announce the next leg of the journey and our plan for the next ten years…
For a long time, we’ve been inspired by the idea of parallel entrepreneurship — that is starting and operating multiple companies at once (as opposed to one after the other) — and admired from afar those who have pioneered it, from Idealab and Betaworks in the US, to Makeshift and Mint Digital on our own turf. It’s part impatience, part opportunism and part common sense… it gives us a greater probability of finding scalable and profitable business models.
We’re obsessed by building great ideas into brilliant businesses, and we’re on a mission to create the best place in the world to do just that. This month, The Eleven relaunches as a startup studio to focus on rapidly developing and testing new ideas, exploring whether the potential we see in our imaginations can be demonstrated in the real world. We will use our existing infrastructure and resources to build teams around the best concepts and scale them quickly as their own independent entities.
We qualify our ideas on their pure potential, regardless of market/industry/sector… those currently in development span sport, food, fashion and engineering. We believe in the power of human potential and that great things happen when great people come together in the pursuit of something awesome, and aspire to be defined by our ability to develop brilliant teams that build brilliant companies.
While maths and logic are all of immense value in our understanding of the world, we are inspired by behavioural science and the study of how and why we all make decisions. We’re fascinated by the potential of technology and believe the magic is in its merger with human psychology to solve real problems worth solving.
Our plan is to found 100 new companies over the next decade. To many, that’s a near impossible challenge. It might be stupid, it might be naive and, frankly, it might not work… and we wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, it wouldn’t be fun if it was easy.
