“Silicon Milkroundabout” seeks to lure geeks from the City
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
One of the biggest challenges facing any tech start-up, particularly in the UK, is recruiting skilled developers.
Rather than sit around waiting for the government’s East London Tech City initiative to bear more fruit than ministerial meet-and-greets, the residents of Shoreditch’s “Silicon Roundabout” are taking matters into their own hands. And yes, it involves a hilariously bad play on words.
The “milk round” has become a staple of British university fairs, as big corporates and consultancies attempt to lure graduates with big salaries to pay down their tuition fees.
For the little guys in “Digital Shoreditch”, as this week’s festival is calling it (could we settle on a single brand please?), a main source of competition for talent is financial institutions in the neighbouring City.
The traffic isn’t all one-way: Iain Dodsworth, creator of Tweetdeck, was previously a developer at Prudential Financial, the US insurance firm. If reports of Tweetdeck’s $50m sale to Twitter are accurate (and it’s likely they are) that’s one way of catching graduates’ attention.
Keen to catch them young, today a new recruitment scheme is launching – called, um, Silicon Milkroundabout.
“Britain is getting its entrepreneurial mojo back,” says Ian Hogarth, chief executive of Songkick, the live music community site, and one of Silicon Milkroundabout’s organisers.
“Whilst the intentions of the government’s London Tech City initiative are great, it doesn’t immediately help with one of our most pressing problems – recruiting talented engineers. Our greatest barrier to recruitment is that technical graduates – and many experienced software developers already working in large companies – aren’t even aware of London’s tech start-ups as an alternative to the more traditional routes of working for a bank, a consultancy, or for Google or Microsoft.”
Between 20 and 30 companies are gathering on Sunday May 15 at Bar Music Hall, a large venue on Shoreditch’s Curtain Road, including several Silicon Roundabout stalwarts such as Songkick, Mind Candy (maker of Moshi Monsters), 7Digital, GroupSpaces, Shutl and even south Londoners Huddle.
Their aim is to demonstrate that riches of a different sort can be found by working for small, entrepreneurial businesses. Further details and registration for graduates can be found at siliconmilkroundabout.com.
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