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It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote a blog post – I’ve been very busy over the past few months with Pint Drop, things have taken off and we have lots of exciting announcements in store to be released over the next couple of months, so keep on the lookout!

It was just over a year ago now that I had the initial brain wave for the Pint Drop concept – it’s staggering to think since then how much the idea has come along, the various tangents we’ve come up with for the product and all the twists and turns we have taken to get where we are now.

In the last year I’ve been running two companies, whilst negotiating the sale of one of them and leading the other. It’s been by no means an easy task, and really highlights how important it is to make decisions. Making a decision is better than not making one at all. The stress of everything going on at the same time last year, meant that I could not truly focus on my degree and also couldn’t fully focus on either of my businesses, so my time and effort was split. I decided I had to sell File Den, and that I would need time out from my degree to make a serious attempt at Pint Drop. It’s for this reason I took the leap in August to request temporary withdrawal from my degree.

Thankfully, the request was granted without too much hassle and the department at the university were more than happy to support me, wishing me all the best with my business. I’m sure that if I went back this term I would have frequently been choosing between working towards an exam, or piece of coursework and adding that new feature to Pint Drop – this allows me to do something that I’ve never really had the chance to do in my life, and that’s focus on one thing. Since the age of 14 I’ve been juggling education with business, and it’s great to now be able to sit down and work without having to worry about an essay or coursework deadline. It also means I can work on what I truly love, start-ups. (As exciting as Fourier transforms may be..)

I still have the option available to return in the future to my second year, technically I can have up to 2 years out before returning to where I left off. Although, if everything goes as planned, it won’t be necessary.

I think it’s great to be able to get involved in a start-up whilst at university (it’s the perfect opportunity to meet like minded people, and find partners that complement your skillset) but it is important not to divide your focus too much, or you’ll perform sub-optimally in everything you do. Know your limits. I’ve had many people giving me variously well constructed iterations of the following: “don’t leave your degree, focus on finishing that then go out and do what you want, at least then you’ll have something to fall back on if everything goes wrong” – my answer to this is always if I’m not focussed on Pint Drop, and don’t believe 100% in it, why am I working on it in the first place? I can still go back in 1 year, or 2 years if necessary – it’s not the end of the world. Would I really ever want to get a “normal” job anyway? I’m pretty set on being my own boss: being the creator of my own path and destiny.

The media is making founding a start-up look increasingly attractive to young people across the world – which is great, but is entrepreneurship being over-glamorised? Do young people really know what they’re getting themselves in for when they start a new company? One of the most obvious examples to citate is that of ‘The Social Network’ – the film showing the origins of Facebook and how it came to be what it is today. Throughout the film Facebook was illustrated as a tremendous amount of fun, almost all the time – with parties, drinking competitions to hire programmers and millions of dollars flying around consistently.

Television programs like ‘The Dragons Den’ show lots of aspiring entrepreneurs pitching their new ideas to potential investors, and Tech Crunch is quick to report on every single fund raising made by a start-up. This may seem innocent on the surface, but is it having an underlying effect on young entrepreneurs of moving the goalposts? Do entrepreneurs see success in raising capital, and less so in the execution of their idea and generating a valuable exit? Raising investment should be seen less as an achievement, and more of a catalyst to achieve your real goal of developing a successful business.

Raising capital is one of the very early stages of setting up a company, and it’s only going to get harder. Imagine, for example, you have 10 employees working for you, of whom many are becoming friends of yours. There’s some cataclysmic disaster either within your business or market, and your income suddenly drops off. You only have 2 months of capital remaining – if you make half your team redundant, you can extend this runway by 4 months, enough time to raise more money, or turn things around. You have two options, you either let the company fail, or fire 5 friends of yours. All those early stage investors will be coming down on you like a ton of bricks to ensure that the prior option does not occur, leaving you with the task of firing your 5 friends. Your 5 friends will have mortgages, families and other commitments. These are the kind of decisions you are getting yourself in for when you start a company – and in 99% of cases you will be forced to make similar decisions, only the luckiest of founders escape. Marc Randolph, for example, is known for describing his first few years as CEO at Netflix as “four years of pissing blood”.

It’s not by all means doom and gloom, the highs are high and realising significant achievements within your start-up is a fantastic feeling. So don’t let this post discourage you from starting a company, but be aware that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, that running a business is real, hard work and that raising money isn’t the end of it. You will then be far more adequately prepared to make your business a success.

Since finishing work over at Zoombu last September (which incidentally has since been acquired by Sky Scanner), a huge amount has happened. Pint Drop was conceptualised on a rather dull train journey back from London and was officially formed in October, the same month that I embarked on another journey, studying Computer Science & Business Studies at the University of Warwick. I spent a lot of time during this early period trying to decide what was best to do, whether I needed a degree and at times I came close to choosing to work on Pint Drop full time. In November 2009 I left the Computing course over at Imperial for numerous reasons, and knew that if I took the same route this time that I would definitely not be going back to university.

Deciding on whether to continue higher education or not is doubtlessly a big decision faced by many entrepreneurs over the world. We are bombarded with examples of entrepreneurs who have made it despite being “drop outs”, examples include Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin who left school at 16 and more recently Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard. You could not argue that these people made the wrong decision. I spent most of my career at school being sent down a very specific path: you take your GCSEs, A-Levels, leave, go to university (perhaps after a typical gap year, where you travel for several months or work in a ski resort for a while), get a degree and go on to a graduate job at a large corporate firm. At school we were never given much indication that there were alternatives – that you could start your own business and be successful without a degree. The school just wanted as many people as possible on their list going to the top 10 universities. This attitude has led to lots of people on campuses taking a degree, with little idea why they are taking it. They are taking a degree because they feel that they have to, that if they don’t they will be a failure. They have no idea what they want to do after university, whether their degree will even help them in what they want to do.

At Imperial College, I fell into the “they” group above. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I began. Imperial had told me all about their £35k+ average starting salary for their graduates and I didn’t feel like there was much of an alternative if I wanted to have a successful career – I had the opportunity to study at one of the world’s best universities. With an  Imperial degree I would be set for life. The reality was very different – a few weeks into my degree I was having substantial doubts over whether I wanted to be doing this for the next few years. I hated the course and it wasn’t long until I left. The few weeks after leaving were fairly traumatic – I’d just made the decision to leave the degree I spent the last 2 years studying intensely for, all those stressful times pushing myself to make sure I got all the A’s I would need to meet their offer had been wasted. What would I do now? I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself or where I wanted to go.

For a couple of months I did very little, made a few small websites – considered starting a local web development and SEM firm, finally deciding that I would try to get a job. Surely I wouldn’t have a problem getting a development job with all the relevant programming experience I had over the years. For weeks I was sending off applications, heard nothing back and quickly realised that I wasn’t going to get a job I enjoyed without a degree. I begun looking at universities again, learning from what I disliked about Imperial College to pick a course and university that really suited what and where I wanted to go. I knew that I wanted to work in the online space and narrowed down my chosen courses to two: Computer Science & Management at Loughborough and Computer Science & Business Studies at Warwick. Loughborough’s course was very web focussed and Warwick’s left a huge amount of flexibility in choosing exactly which modules I wanted to do throughout the degree. I ended up choosing Warwick – I felt that the degree would challenge me more after reading the module descriptions and both the business school and CS department had great reputations.

After sending off my university applications, I changed my approach to trying to find some work for the summer. I went onto the UK Crunchboard and looked at all the London start-ups that were hiring. I sent every single one a targeted email explaining what I had done in the past, what I liked about their company and the work experience I was looking for. I was shocked when several of the companies got back to me, I chose 2, went along to interviews and both offered me a position. In the end I picked Zoombu. Whilst working at Zoombu I gained a huge amount of experience from working in a small team and in areas such as Agile Development, working with the Zend framework and producing more efficient and usable code. Working at Zoombu cemented in my mind that I wanted to be involved in tech start-ups for the considerable future.

This all loops around to the beginning of this post – starting at Warwick. As explained, for a couple of weeks I had doubts as to whether I truly needed a degree to do what I wanted to – whether I was just taking an easy route, delaying an entrance into the “real world” as such. I decided to stick it out and I have no regrets, I have already learned a lot, especially from the formal business side of the course and am looking forward to what the course will teach me in the coming couple of years. I have met lots of great people and am looking forward to whatever comes next. Of course, if I have my own Zuckerberg moment and Pint Drop truly does take off, taking too much of my time to reasonably continue my degree, I will make the leap. Until then I feel that university has a lot more to offer, and that I can balance obtaining a good degree with running a successful company.