![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/octopus_chis.png?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Chris Hulatt was just 23 when he decided corporate life wasn\u2019t for him. He\u2019d spent two-and-a-half years on Mercury Asset Management\u2019s grad program. It was long enough to meet cofounders Simon Rogerson and Guy Myles, and long enough to know he wanted out.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone thought we were totally mad,\u201d Hulatt recalled of the moment the three of them dropped out of the coveted grad program to launch Octopus Investments at the turn of the millennium.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t have a grand business plan or any investors lined up\u2014just $25,000 of Hulatt\u2019s savings, what they now call the \u201cTerminator gene\u201d and zero desire to ever return to the corporate world.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought: \u2018Why don\u2019t we have a crack at starting our own fund management business?\u2019 You know, one of those kinds of rash things that people sometimes decide to do,\u201d Hulatt told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to get a traditional job again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Hulatt never did have to go back to the 9-to-5 grind for another employer.<\/p>\n Today, Octopus Investments manages more than $13.2 billion on behalf of its clients, according to the company. More than 70% of these funds target investments that tackle climate change, improve people\u2019s quality of life, and address inequality.<\/p>\n And the company is now one of six divisions under the parent company, Octopus Group, which includes the British energy giant Octopus Energy. He\u2019s still co-running Octopus Group which now employs over 14,000 people and serves 11.3 million customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Without their salaries to fall back on, Octopus\u2019s Hulatt and his cofounders had to find investors for the business quickly or face returning to their old jobs with their tails between their legs.<\/p>\n They set up camp in the front room of Hulatt\u2019s London flat with a trusty copy of the Yellow Pages, one landline phone between them and \u201cone ancient laptop which was about an inch thick\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe spent much of 2000 calling thousands of people to try to persuade them to invest in this startup fund manager company they\u2019d never heard of run by three very young people who didn\u2019t exactly have a long pedigree in the financial industry,\u201d Hulatt said. \u201cIt was super hard.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne person held his phone up, and he said, \u2018listen to this, this is the noise of my shredder shredding your business plan\u2014never call me again.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cIt would have been all too easy after we\u2019d spent a month or two trying to persuade people to invest in us to just give up and assume we weren\u2019t going to go anywhere,\u201d he added\u2014but they didn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Wolf of Wall Street\u2018s Jordan Belfort would say, they picked up the phone and kept dialing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n By the end of the year, after many noes, the young founders had convinced 85 people to inject around $2 million into Octopus Investments.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a lesson in the power of small wins: It wasn\u2019t a first-of-its-kind idea, an impressive presentation that won over a big VC firm, or even a stroke of luck that got Octopus Investment off the ground and into the success it is today.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just kept at it. It\u2019s that kind of stubborn refusal to give in\u2014we call it the \u201cTerminator gene\u201d\u2014that has been so important to us,\u201d Hulatt advises budding entrepreneurs.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou just have to be totally persistent, totally believe in yourself and never give up.\u201d<\/p>\n A version of this story originally published on\u00a0<\/em>Fortune.com<\/em>\u00a0on\u00a0April 27, 2024<\/em>.<\/p>\n Read more CEO and founder profiles from Fortune\u2019s Orianna Rosa Royle<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #grads #office #life #years #hated #itthey #built #13B #empire #Octopus #Energy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Hulatt was just 23 when he decided corporate life wasn\u2019t for him. He\u2019d spent two-and-a-half years on Mercury Asset Management\u2019s grad program. It was long enough to meet cofounders… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12097,1039,2376,424,426,1285,1058,926,2377,7382,3038,427,1341,1917,3027,4544,12096,1434,12098,1521,3063,12095,56,84],"class_list":["post-10257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-13b","tag-built","tag-career","tag-career-advice","tag-careers","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-empire","tag-energy","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-europe-ceo","tag-europe-migrated","tag-evergreen-refresh","tag-funding","tag-grads","tag-hated","tag-how-i-made-my-first-million","tag-itthey","tag-life","tag-octopus","tag-office","tag-u-k","tag-u-k-ceo","tag-uk","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Pick up the phone and start dialing<\/h2>\n