On Tuesday night we held the first of our ‘Aspire’ lectures. The aim is to bring a wide selection of world-class speakers into school so that pupils can hear their stories and find inspiration from them.
Our inaugural lecture certainly achieved that goal, with young entrepreneur Timothy Armoo holding the Speech Hall audience in the palm of his hand for over an hour and a half.
From ordinary beginnings in a fourth-floor council flat in South London, Timothy has become one of the UK’s most successful business people. He created his first successful business whilst still at school, which he sold for £100,000 and went on to create the company Fanbytes, which helped mainstream companies like Apple and McDonald’s connect to millions of young people on social media. In 2021 he was named in the Forbes Thirty Under Thirty list for his achievements in marketing and media and eventually sold Fanbytes for around £35m.
Since then, Timothy has built and sold other businesses, published a bestselling book about entrepreneurialism called What’s Stopping You? and is in demand as a keynote speaker on the future of e-commerce, marketing, social media, AI and diversity.
Despite his success, Timothy believes that there’s ‘nothing special or different’ about himself, and he urged the Cranleigh audience not to worry that they didn’t have the right stuff to succeed. In fact, he stressed that youthfulness is a huge competitive advantage. Younger people, with fewer ties and responsibilities, are more able to innovate and their energy is a superpower to be harnessed. Timothy stressed that not every venture will be successful and he shared some examples of dark and difficult times. His mantra became ‘it’s not that deep’, which has helped him achieve a sense of perspective and bounce forward after setbacks.
Timothy’s early success was built on mastering social media and his message to our pupils was to embrace the AI revolution and become experts in that field.
After a captivating forty-minute lecture, Timothy took almost an hour of questions from pupils, and he was clearly impressed by the quality of the contributions from the audience, extending the Q&A session well beyond what was originally intended.
It was a memorable evening, which left a lasting impression on everyone, especially the winning CranDo team, who had dinner with him before, and Freddie, a Fifth Form pupil who stole the show at the end by challenging Timothy to a high-stakes game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’. If you follow him on LinkedIn, you can see for yourself.
More Aspire lectures are planned for the 2026/27 academic year.
