12 May 2015 16:49

Two entrepreneurial Lancaster University students have visited California’s Silicon Valley gaining inspirational ideas and meeting potential investors.

Tom Young, 20, and Fraser Williams, 20, who are both Entrepreneurship and Management students visited Google’s Campus, Stanford University, and renown tech business incubators such as Startup Basecamp, where they witnessed business pitches to investors, and Founders Space Accelerator.

In addition they held promising talks with venture capital investors to seed-fund their closely-guarded business idea, which they say will be a ‘revolutionary technology tool for students’ when it launches later this year.

Fraser Williams said: “We learned a great deal from the trip. One of the biggest lessons was that investors care a lot more about the team they are potentially investing in than the product. Essentially, you can’t be a success without a strong team and having a good team behind you helps open doors.”

Tom Young said: “The trip to Silicon Valley was without doubt the most intense period of learning either of us have done. It was a very worthwhile experience and we are now in a much stronger position to launch our business.”

The duo were supported on their trip by the Lancaster University Enterprise Centre, Lancashire County Council, Santander UK and Lancaster University’s Department of Entrepreneurship, Strategy & Innovation.

For more information about the Lancaster University Enterprise Centre visit http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/enterprisecentre/

More information about entrepreneurship at Lancaster University management School is available by visiting http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/esi/.