David Langer had offers to work in the City, but chose instead to focus on his website for clubs and societies...

When did you leave university? What have you been up to since?

I graduated from St. Anne’s College, Oxford with a maths degree in June 2007 and in September 2007 was awarded 2nd place in the UK Graduate of the Year competition for my achievements while at university – mainly for setting up GroupSpaces.com.

Since graduating, I’ve been working full-time on GroupSpaces.com at the Oxford Centre for Innovation.

What were your career choices when you left, and why did you decide to go down the entrepreneurial route?

During my vacations, I’d interned with both Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan, done the Discover course with McKinsey & Company and I was also on the Citigroup bursary.

At the end of my degree, I’d been headhunted by some investment banks and had offers to work at a number of different companies.

My career decision-making process involved optimising for personal development, passion, learning and impact, and based on those criteria, entrepreneurship (and GroupSpaces) was the obvious decision.

What advantages are there of being your own boss?

I have no set hours, no-one tells me what to do and I have ultimate decision-making power. For non-conformists like myself, it’s the ideal situation.

What challenges have you met?

Lifestyle is the big one. With no set hours and no boss, there is no structure enforced upon my life – I have to create it from scratch.

How does your lifestyle differ from your peers who have taken more traditional routes?

I think that I’m developing much faster and much more holistically than my peers who’ve gone on to do further study or work in the City. I also think that I enjoy my job more.

However, it’s not all great – my peers who work in the City all earn more than I do currently – I’m trying to pay myself as little as possible to maximise what we get out of the investment we’ve had.

What qualities do you think are necessary for a successful entrepreneur?

An appetite for risk, an open mind and an unreasonable aversion to failure – you have to be ridiculously determined to be successful.

The ride of a start-up has high highs and low lows - you have to be comfortable sitting on the ride, and have a burning desire to stay on until the end.

How did GroupSpaces come about? Was it a lightbulb idea, or the result of a longer process?

We initially wanted to create a website with all the news and events from clubs and societies at Oxford. After launching this site in October 2006, with a target of signing up 50 societies in the first 6 months, we signed up over 100 in the first 6 days so there were early signs the idea had legs.

Over the first few months, we received a lot of feedback from presidents of societies asking us to build more tools to help them manage their groups. The status quo was a mailing list on Herald or a Yahoo! Group, a membership database in Microsoft Excel, events on Facebook and a website that was either broken or a chore to keep up-to-date. It was a mess and GroupSpaces became hell bent on sorting it all out.

What are your long-term plans for GroupSpaces? Will you still be involved in it in ten years?

We want to build group management tools for the world. We’re focusing on university societies in the UK to start with, as that’s the market we know and understand best. But the world’s a big place - every club, society, charity and other real-world group needs to run a mailing list, keep track of their members, maintain a web presence and hold events – there are hundreds of millions of groups in the world who could benefit from our product.

In the long term, I’d love to guide GroupSpaces all the way to IPO, but if we have one of the global technology or media giants come knocking on our door to buy us in a few years time, it might be hard to say no.

What do you what to move into later in your career?

I feel totally comfortable with my role in the global society, creating solutions to the world’s problems. As long as I live, I expect the world to continue to have big problems, and later in my career, I’d like to solve some more of them, and help other entrepreneurs do the same.

What would your ideal set-up be when you reach retirement age?

I don’t believe in retirement. Life is about doing what you love - it’s too short. Whether that’s strictly defined as ‘working’ or being ‘retired’ is pretty subjective.

A better answer might be that I don’t want to be the engine behind my ventures once I’ve got a wife and a family - and that will hopefully be in my early 30s.

Are you the next Mark Zuckerburg?

Mark has achieved a huge amount for a 23 yr old and Facebook is awe-inspiring.

I’m also a very young CEO with a big vision and a lot of drive, so watch me and find out…I write a blog at www.davidlanger.co.uk entitled Freed from The Matrix and Twitter too much at www.twitter.com/langer.