The road ahead for WarwickTECH
Doubling down on our mission to build Warwick’s tech hub
Just over 5 years ago, Alex Bucknall and I founded WarwickTECH on the notion that Warwick University needed a space for technical and non-technical undergraduates to come together and build. Far from the scrappy team that we once were, we built a tribe of technical, operational, and product-focused people and made great progress in achieving our goal of building a self-sustaining tech hub at Warwick. But there’s much more to be done. We’re now at the end of the beginning of that journey, and have laid down our plans to achieve our goals for the next 5 years.
Doubling down on Warwick startups
Our long-standing vision is to build a self-sustaining tech hub at Warwick University. Now that we’ve started to develop the technical aspects of the ecosystem through internationally recognised events including WarwickHACK with support from Major League Hacking, and Tech Night LDN in collaboration with she++, we will now expand our view toward building exceptionally impactful products, and providing the guidance and the tools to scale Warwick startups. We hope that they will join the likes of early-stage projects Fanbytes, HomeRun, Ticketpass, Finimize, CloudNC and FavourUp and more mature companies including Buffer, Firebase, and Electric Imp who also have Warwick alum as founders.
Teams like ours often suffer from the ‘charge model problem’. We enjoy working with startups, but the business model doesn’t work. We can’t charge startups cash, because the startups don’t have any, and we can’t charge startups ‘sweat equity’ because we need cash to cover our costs (hackathons… 👀). If we had a fund, we would use the management fees to cover our costs and receive a performance-based upside based on the startups we choose to back and the value we add. Through a partnership with SimplifyVC, we will be investing in at least two Warwick startups in 2020 alongside running our existing events— much more detail to follow later on in the year!
What’s coming up?
One of the most difficult things we’ve had to face so far is the huge gap between the number of ideas in the Warwick ecosystem, and the number of people who can, or are willing to, build products around them. Historically, there have been too many wantrapreneurs at Warwick — people who fall in love with the idea of building the next Facebook or Uber, but don’t want to put the work in. Furthermore, there is still too much poaching and mistreatment of technical talent, and an overall lack of expert-generalism. Our events filter down the number of ideas (through ‘venture-level’ pragmatism), and enable founders with those great ideas to code, build, and realise those ideas. We‘re also building up the existing technical talent pool, particularly now in design and product development where Warwick has historically lacked.
The flagship events and initiatives that we will run are as follows:
- Campus Startup: Our twice-termly social for the whole student community, where we first met the likes of Fanbytes and Ticketpass. More details to follow for this term! 👩🎓
- Summer Social: A new relaxed, summer drinks we’ll be running each year to check in with our former team members and early supporters who are off doing exciting things in the London tech space! 🍹
- Startup Day: Our annual event for future tech leaders, we’ll bring together founders, operators, and investors from across the tech landscape at all stages of the journey who will share their insight and support for Warwick’s future tech pioneers — coming up in November 2020! 🚀
- WarwickHACK: Our flagship hackathon in collaboration with MLH running for the 6th time, 150+ software developers and product designers (from first-timers to seasoned pros) whipping up prototypes with code and coffee — next up in February 2021, date tbc! 👩💻
- Tech Night LDN: The ultimate cherry on the cake, we’ll invite some of the best of the Europe’s tech and VC leaders to share their thoughts on their startups, funds and roles — giving you the advice and support needed to create the next moonshot, next hosted at The Shard in March 2021! 🌖 🏹
Note: We won’t be running our flagship events WarwickHACK and Tech Night LDN in Q1 2020 while we transition, but we’ll be promoting plenty of events from our community — if you’ve got an event you’d like us to share then please contact Leon!
Finding the diamonds in the rough
One of the earliest decisions we made was to not become an SU society (although we work with several of them and will continue to do so). We weren’t particularly well suited for corporates — they sponsored us for recruitment, but most of our event attendees were interested in building product or starting their own ventures. We made the right choice — although, it has made defining WarwickTECH ‘membership’ challenging. On the other hand, we have seen some fantastic startup communities flourish in London since we set up WarwickTECH — most notably YSYS, founded and championed by Deborah Okenla. She’s cracked the community engagement conundrum by setting up an application form into their Slack group to ensure that community members will actively contribute and are the best-in-class (if I may say so myself 😅). VCs including First Round and Blossom Capital also have similar approaches and we expect to launch our own by the end of 2020. 🚀
In light of all of this, we’ve made some changes to our board. In April 2019, we were delighted to have 2018/19 WarwickTECH President Elizabeth Lam stay on as a trustee! She first joined the team in 2016 after documenting the inaugural Tech Night LDN (and again last year! ☝🏿) and has driven much of the organisation’s growth first hand, first leading partnerships (the first time we’d ever had someone running it), and then leading the whole team. After leading our design efforts in 2018 and leading WarwickTECH as 2019/20 President, we’re also thrilled to have Viktoriia Tkachenko come on as a trustee! My co-founder Alex Bucknall and trustee Artur Safaryan have decided to step down and directly support startups in the hardware space and frontier-market social impact space respectively. We wouldn’t exist without them and they’ll always be part of the WarwickTECH family!
WarwickTECH’s initial remit was to bridge the gap between tech, business, and design through an open and inclusive community. Investing in Warwick startups is the next evolutionary step in that journey. We will continue to build on our efforts to help people learn new skills within a diverse and intersectional community, to build great products with equally exceptional people, and ultimately to scale their startups and drive positive impact wherever they see fit. If you’d like to work with us, please drop me an email at harry [at] warwick [dot] tech.
