London, England, United Kingdom
At Zzish I ran business operations, headed up the commercial/sales team, raised investment and looked after talent and people functions for a brilliant, passionate, quirky team across three countries. I devised and ran four mega-successful funding campaigns via Crowdcube (totalling £2.9m, the biggest total Edtech crowdfund in the UK at the time), raising a total of £6m in seed funding. I oversaw scale of the business from a few early teacher adopters to 12 million active global users and set up the people and operational infrastructure the company has today. I had an active and strategic influence on the trajectory of our venture: overseeing key cross-functional projects day-to-day whilst sitting on the board as a director of the business. The most important part of my job? I helped our learning technology platform impact the education of over 12 million students in 170 countries. Whilst I focused on the commercials and ops, our talented engineering team and my cofounder Dr. Charles Wiles, one of our country's leading technologists, built a deep technology platform for teacher insight and student learning personalisation that we truly believe will change the future of education for the better.
Directed the first ever large-scale conference for the UK Crowdfunding Association. Operations, ticketing, sponsorship, programme design, event logistics, sourcing 80 influential speakers from across the world of entrepreneurship and investment. Ran the event over two days at Shoreditch town hall including 80 speakers, 10 workshops, awards, an exhibition and a party!
Eventbrite is the world’s largest self-service ticketing platform. A Silicon Valley Tech 'Unicorn', Eventbrite has processed more than $3.5B in ticket sales in 180 countries. As BD Manager my verticals spanned Education, Charity and the Arts. My role was varied - from developing relationships with event organisers to understand business goals and technical requirements, to working with internal product and ops teams to build out ticketing solutions for clients, to sales operations. Consistent over-performance on all KPI's, hit sales target each quarter with 33 contracts signed in Q4 2015. Met loads of cool event organisers & helped fundraise millions for our charity clients! Moved over from Eventbrite to the client side to direct events, whilst setting up my own venture.
Useful Music provides original sheet music downloads, tailored for learners and their instruments. The brand new site is backed by one of Britain's most successful composers, Graham Lyons: after 45 years of teaching and with over half a million print music sales under his belt, we have turned his catalogue digital. We have created a blueprint to give good educational music by self-published composers a global platform. Why? Simply, we wanted to make it much easier for teachers to find music for their students to play. So we asked teachers what would help them, and we developed it. Musicians can now preview scores, hear a piece, download it individually, and play it within a couple of minutes. Our niche is educational sheet music: many of the pieces feature on grade exams, many will become new favourites, all are exclusive to the site. My role: project managing usefulmusic.com from the initial concept to implementation, with all the research, branding, business development, partnerships, marketing campaigns, PR, events, blood, sweat and spreadsheets that go with launching a start-up.
Ran the sales for the consultancy side of HG - a new role for the business. Departed after a few months in the City to start my own venture, Useful Music.