Meet William R. G. Beauchamp, founder of Seamless Capital
From a young age I’ve been drawn towards entrepreneurship: at 9 years old I was begging my mum to drive me round the local corner shops - I would buy out their entire stock of sweets in an attempt to outcompete my classmates in the school’s clandestine Haribo trade. I managed to reap a £2 return on my invested pocket money before Miss Jones said we weren’t allowed to anymore.
Hello Will, first and foremost it is an absolute pleasure to be interviewing you today, please tell me a little about yourself?
I’m 30 years old and originally from London, although now I live in Cambridge where our head office is located. I founded Seamless Capital nearly a decade ago and have been CEO here ever since. I love technology but also have a passion for nature and the wilderness.
At the age of 18, you had made over £100,000 playing poker, what made you interested in the game at such a young age?
My dad played poker and I remember thinking “this is amazing” - I loved the idea that you could use mathematics to beat the game and make money independently.
In many ways, what we do at Seamless is like the poker I played when I was younger: we do some maths and use our results to take an educated risk. In poker, I would always be doing some statistics and trying to learn how likely different hands would be. Now I do the same, but with trading.
Who or what inspired you to get started?
A friend from university invited me up to London to work with him on this side project and I was hooked - I couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to get to work and find out what we could accomplish. After a year we had lost £10,000. The friend left when he got a great job in the US but I saw potential here, so I kept at it. A year later I was making over £100,000 and we haven’t stopped growing since.
How did you fund it all in the beginning?
Playing poker I managed to make enough money to fund Seamless back in the days when we were making a loss. From then on Seamless has always run on reinvested profits. I’m tremendously grateful for the independence this has given us!
What would you identify as your biggest accomplishment to date as a company?
Of everything we’ve accomplished through the years at Seamless, I think I’m most proud of the way our people have grown. A lot of our people are young: it brings me a lot of joy and pride to see fresh grads becoming great coders and traders. Their personalities make them a joy to teach and to work with, so I’m very thankful for each of them.
Recharging every so often, especially as a parent and entrepreneur are important. How do you recharge when you’re feeling burnt out?
From a young age, I was exploring in the woods, where we could get blazing campfires going from next to nothing - it had me hooked on adventure! In my spare time, I love to share this adventurer spirit with my family. My oldest daughter has just turned 3 and already she’s a brave daredevil who loves to explore the great outdoors.
What’s your proudest moment?
When I got accepted to Cambridge it was a huge thing to me and my family. I was the first one in my family to go to university and my parents were pretty proud.
Whenever Seamless hits a huge milestone it makes me feel super-proud of what I’ve accomplished and what we’ve achieved as a team. But, to be honest, my real pride in life is my wife, our daughters and the life we live together.
What habits do you think helped you to become successful?
Growing up I was an atheist but I’ve grown to see that there’s more to life than relying on your own understanding. Every week at Seamless, we do a Bible study, which teaches us more about what it is to be a good person and how we ought to
help others around us. Habits like this have helped me to grow, not only in my home life, but also at work. It’s taught me the fundamentals of life: doing the right thing, even if it scares you, respect and humility mean more than wealth and status, and above all, never give up.
What are your thoughts on failure as an entrepreneur?
Along your journey in life, no matter who you are, you will inevitably experience painful failures. You can either use them to fuel your development and growth, or allow them to ruin you - it depends on how you deal with them.
At Seamless, making mistakes is fine: what isn’t okay is not learning from them. By saying “it’s okay to make a mistake”, we can use it to fuel our personal growth, which helps us progress rapidly. In the long-run, we make fewer big, costly mistakes. Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that do not work.”
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs seeking to grow their business?
The secret to our rapid growth at Seamless comes down to two things: culture and team. We’ve cultivated a sort-of unusual culture based around transparency: our team loves giving brutal feedback because it helps us to grow as individuals. Painful feedback is the most important - with pain and reflection comes growth. Junior hires right out of university will tell me I’m being silly - anywhere else this would get them into trouble but I encourage them to hold everyone to high standards.
Our team is made up of ambitious, talented people with a lot of integrity. In my experience over the past decade at Seamless, this is the most important thing.
