A TEENAGE entrepreneur expects to attract around 500 people to the inaugural Start-Up Summit he has organised.
Bruce Walker, a second year international business student at Edinburgh Napier University, has secured speakers such as Fraser Doherty from Superjam, Gregor Lawson from Morphsuits and MSP Fergus Ewing.
US based Stacey Ferreira, 20, will also be flying in to Edinburgh to talk about her success with online bookmark company MySocialCloud.com.
Attendees at the event, where ticket prices range from £10 to £30, are primarily drawn from the student and school populations while there have also been around 30 corporate tickets sold to businesses.
Mr Walker said: "It is about enabling the connections. We set up an event which has everything a new entrepreneur needs to start up in one room. So they can speak to successful entrepreneurs, support agencies and also speak to each other as well.
"When you set up a great event with the right speakers and right organisations but if you can't get the entrepreneurs to buy into then you haven't done anything. So to get 500 people interested in signing up is just fantastic."
Mr Walker, 19, set up social enterprise We Are The Future and ran an enterprise event in February 2012 which was attended by around 135 people.
There is now a team of seven other Edinburgh-based students working at We Are The Future with Mr Walker drawing up ambitious plans to expand the Start-Up Summit concept.
Mr Walker said: "We want to take the Summit on tour and take it all across the UK so people run one in their local area. That will then also feed back in to the annual summit in Edinburgh every year. We have got some people interested in Glasgow so we will hopefully take Scotland first and then move into England."
Mr Walker indicated if the UK roll-out, which will start next year, goes well he may look to explore taking the concept internationally and said: "Our keynote speaker, Stacey Ferreira, has come over from California so there is a possibility to go global."
Other speakers at the Summit, held at the Assembly Rooms, include Abigail Stevens of Think Global Recruitment and Gavin Oates from Tree of Knowledge.
There are also panels and workshops featuring Entrepreneurial Spark, Edinburgh Napier University, Women's Enterprise Scotland and Dragons' Den's Shaf Rasul.
Mr Walker admitted securing the line-up took a lot of patience.
He said: "It was a mixture of being incredibly persistent as it took a long time to find contact details for some people and also calling in favours.
"So [I was] asking other entrepreneurs I know who could potentially put me in touch with people and exhausting my contacts."
While Mr Walker admits balancing work alongside his academic tasks can be "quite challenging" he does not want to abandon either. He said: "I love working with We Are The Future and if I wasn't doing that I'm not sure I could stick in at university. There needs to be a balance of the both."
Along with Lottery funding We Are The Future received backing from Business Gateway, Edinburgh Council and Royal Bank of Scotland to put on the Start-Up Summit. Other supporters include Highland Spring, Easyspace, Exolta Capital Partners, MBM Commercial, Denvir, Bizcrowd, UnLtd and Ignited Minds.
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