Hi! My name’s Alex and I’m the Founder and CEO of Beam.
Beam is the world’s first online platform that crowdfunds employment training for homeless people. Beam is partnered with more than 10 charities and funded primarily by innovation grants from the Mayor of London and Nesta. Beam launched in September 2017. If you want to do hugely innovative and life-changing work, join us.
I advise startups including JustPark, a startup backed by Index Ventures and BMW, which I ran as CEO for 3 years. I’m also on the board of crowdfunding platform, Spacehive who empower people to make their local area better.
I’m the author of a book on the sharing economy called The Business of Sharing. You can read about how I ended up running a company and writing a book at the same time here. I interviewed some tech heroes like the founders of Airbnb, Zipcar and BlaBlaCar and met a tiny fraction of the millions of people using sharing and P2P services. I’ve since become an expert on the “sharing economy” – or as it’s sometimes called – the collaborative economy or collaborative consumption. I’ve discussed the sharing economy on the BBC, Bloomberg, Sky among others and spoken at conferences around the world.
I also wrote a novel during a career break – there’s a synopsis here.
If you’ve stumbled across this and want to get to know me, find me on Twitter.
Alex Stephany 