Join us for lunch with ex-Freeserve CTO, Rob Wilmot
TheBusinessDesk.com’s first business lunch in Nottingham will see serial entrepreneur Rob Wilmot talk about his extremely successful career.
Tickets for the event, at the Lace Market Hotel, from 12pm until 3pm on Tuesday 7 November, are now available by clicking here.
Rob has had a diverse working life. In 1998 he was one of the three founding executives of Freeserve, launched by the retailer Dixon. Freeserve became the UK’s largest ISP in just three months and floated on the London Stock Exchanged after only nine months with a market cap of £1.6 billion – entering the FTSE 100 and peaking at a market cap of £9 billion. At the age of 29, Rob found himself one of the youngest ever executive officers of a FTSE 100 company.
Dixons sold Freeserve to France Telecom for £1.6bn in 2001, when Rob exited the company. Since then he’s founded and invested in a number of businesses.
He is currently CEO of his most recent venture, Crowdicity. With offices in Nottingham, London and Sydney, Crowdicity provides an award winning innovation management platform that allows organisations to tap into the power of their crowds to source, refine and select ideas, insights and opinions from employees, partners and consumers.
Rob is also partner and chairman of bcsAgency, a marketing and communications agency based in Nottingham, and is a non-executive director and chair of the Technology Committee of the Crown Commercial Service, an executive agency sponsored by the Cabinet Office which provides commercial services to the public sector and saves money for the taxpayer.
He also recently completed his two-year tenure as HM Government’s Crown Commercial Representative for Software. Working out of the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, he was responsible for resetting relationships with IBM, Oracle and Microsoft and developing commercial capability across government departments; bringing at risk project back in track and driving over a billion pounds in savings through the renegotiation of key government contracts.
Rob was recently made an entrepreneur in residence at the University of York where he is helping with the commercialisation of research, including AI and machine learning. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bradford (his alma mater) for his contribution to work of the university in the field of the Internet. He has also held a number of key roles in further education, including being invited in as chair to lead the turn-around of the failing Doncaster College, which returned to financial health and achieved the status of Good in its Ofsted inspection after seven years of hard work. In 2013 Rob was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his work in education.
Rob is also an in-demand keynote speaker, with high profile assignments such as a TEDxKrakow talk on The Crowdsourcing of Innovation, and is this year a Jury member of the European Investment Bank Institute, Social Innovation Tournament, which this year is held in Riga.
Join us for what will be a fascinating take on what it takes to build a successful organisation.
