From Sixth Former Tom:
Matthieu Brown is a former Downside pupil in Roberts who left in 2019 and his lecture to the Lower Sixth was an interesting and inspiring talk showing that there are other paths apart from university that can lead to success.
Matthieu explained how he balanced his schoolwork whilst also setting up a company, spending many Fridays and Saturdays working through the night with a friend on Discord to get his start up off the ground. He mentioned what he was motivated by and that one major reason was to prove people wrong and show that he could do well at A levels, as well as start a successful company. His first company, a food delivery service for locally produced health foods & local businesses, was later sold to a company in New York. He worked with the new owners for a while before leaving to try further innovative ventures. Included in these is the creation of Solestial, a new means to educate Gen-Z in finance & business through a metaverse built within Minecraft where players are able to create companies, drop IPOs, manage employees and lots more without having to go through the risk of doing it in the real world.
Matthieu was recruited to work for a real estate company where he became the youngest Head of IT in the history of the company. His focus was in the German branch of this major company with over 1,500 employees. More recently, he was head-hunted to work for his current company (Globe.Exchange) in Canary Wharf, London which is linked to cryptocurrency. He is co-leading a new marketplace platform tailored to NFTs within the film industry.
Matthieu’s talk was extremely interesting because he showed that going to university is not the only option after leaving school and that you can build a successful company through skills learnt online and through real world experiences. This talk definitely left its mark on the Lower Sixth which was clearly shown by the wide range of intriguing questions that were asked after the talk was finished.