Oxford University Students Sell Online Service For $5 Million

For those of you who didn't hear earlier, just under a month ago Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar sold Auctomatic, a free online service for auction creation and management, to Live Current Media for 2.5M pounds (approximately $5M). The two cousins started their business while still undergraduates studying and working in the university student society Oxford Entrepreneurs, a group for which Kulveer served as Founder and President (for networking with OE I strongly recommend creating an account on YouNoodle and joining the group). Auctomatic began as the internet auction site Boso.com (Buy Or Sell Online), a service for students supported by Oxfords Sad Business School. The site was almost immediately a home run; it grew into the largest online student marketplace in the UK and eventually hit the radar of Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who took them to the US and put them in touch with 19-year-old computer programmer Patrick Collison. The three revamped Boso.com to become Auctomatic, a service that helps businesses to sell goods on online auction sites like eBay and Overstock.com. The company launched last year with additional financial backing from

Paul Buccheit (creator of Gmail) and Chris Sacca (ex-special head of initiatives at Google). Within months it was sold to Live Current Media, which has now hired the cousins and Patrick. Their story reveals a lot about the character of the entrepreneur. According to a recent profile piece, the cousins have always been interested in generating their own revenue. Kulveer used to trade cards at school as a mini business, while Harjeet took orders of playlists from his friends and sold them CDs. At university, Kulveer quit his job in investment banking (a move I can personally relate to) and Harjeet resisted parental pressure to get a job, turning down an offer to join a prestigious law firm. Finally, while developing Auctomatic in Silicon Valley, the founders lived in their office on foam mats, eating Ramen noodles three times daily for months on end. Needless to say, both took major risks and made serious sacrifices to pursue their passion for entrepreneurship. Another interesting story that surfaced amidst the founders' success was that the two cousins are convinced they could never have experienced such triumph had they remained in the United Kingdom. Kulveer claims that it would have been too expensive and complicated to set up an office and hire staff in London and raising capital is a much more complicated process in Great Britain, with investors making all sorts of initial demands and constraints. In contrast, it took Y Combinator only minutes to move on Boso.com and Paul Buccheit's investment of $75,000 was a result of just a few emails back and forth. Despite the fact that Oxford Entrepreneurs has become the largest student entrepreneur society in the UK (more than 1,200 members) only one in ten run their own companies. The Taggar cousins' experience combined with the apparent follow through deficiency among aspiring British entrepreneurs might suggest that the UK is overall not effectively fostering the growth of entrepreneurship.