Chris Hulatt - Founder Octopus Group

Chris is the co-founder of Octopus Group, who employ 750 people and have over £9 billion pounds under management.

Octopus was started in his bedroom in the year 2000, after he’d left a solid and stable job with Mercury to set up his own fund management company in his mid 20s.

We learn in this episode that perhaps unsurprisingly it took a couple of twenty somethings quite a while to raise their first million pounds to invest in Britains entrepreneurial companies.

But by year 2010 they had achieved a solid scale of fund management and began to think more about the other problems that they could tackle.

This came from the entrepreneurial team that they had created- Matt Cooper one of their fund managers, pitched them an idea about solar panels and now he now heads up the renewables division employing 80 people and having invested £3 billion into renewable energy.

This is where they developed their consumer facing energy supplier Octopus Energy, which is probably what the company is most known for now, having amassed 2 million customers in just five years, and we will be interviewing the CEO, Greg Jackson later in the series.

Chris talks about the different routes they have taken on the journey from being a start up to the major institution that Octopus now is and the more they can and want to do to disrupt other industries such as healthcare.

They started with just yellow pages, their girlfriends paying the rent and a one pager with some ideas scrawled on it.

We talk about how some of the best ideas can come from the most unexpected of places and how they encourage their employees to pitch ideas through their Springboard programme ‘and how the Government can expand their springboard programme to build an army of entrepreneurs’.

But first we start the story by Chris working in a gory lab at the height of the BSE crisis.

We are proud to have partnered with Octopus on this series of Jimmy's Jobs of the future.