How a trio of 20-something entrepreneurs used the 'Terminator gene' to help launch $16.7bn investment firm

Key Facts

But just a brief taste of the corporate world was enough to convince him to put his all (both physically and with every penny of his $25,000 in savings) into making Octopus Investments a success.
“We spent much of 2000 calling thousands of people to try to persuade them to invest in this startup fund manager company they’d never heard of run by three very young people who didn’t exactly have a long pedigree in the financial industry,” Hulatt says.
“One person held his phone up, and he said, ‘listen to this, this is the noise of my shredder shredding your business plan—never call me again.’ “It would have been all too easy after we’d spent a month or two trying to persuade people to invest in us to just give up and assume we weren’t going to go anywhere,” he adds—but they didn’t.
“It took a long, long time (the best part of all of 2000) but we really wanted to try and make business get up and running.”