* Teenager who hated school but set out to become a tycoon

Jonathan Margolis

 

Just after Easter, I wrote in this column about a bunch of British IT veterans, ExactTrak, who — just as they were looking to retire — landed a deal with US chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices to supply some self-destructing memory technology they were making on a small scale in Leicester.

ExactTrak’s founder, 62-year-old Norman Shaw, described how he and his colleagues had to abandon hobbies and gardening projects to travel the world, hire staff and sharply increase production. Four months on, it is moving even faster than the chaps expected. In a few weeks, Mr Shaw will be on stage at a big trade event in San Francisco introducing ExactTrak’s first joint product with AMD.

I was thinking of Mr Shaw again, while meeting Yasser Khattak, a tech entrepreneur at the opposite end of the career continuum — a charismatic 19-year-old from Maidstone, in Kent. While ExactTrak was hitting the big time more or less accidentally, he was meticulously planning a meteoric rise for himself, and is already several lunges up the greasy pole.

I met him at the Gherkin offices of tech recruiter Satigo, in London, which is hunting down staff to work with a chief executive who weeks ago was still in student accommodation. “Would you accept a six-figure salary from a 19-year-old?” he suggests as an opening line for an article, making sure I write it down. It may sound a bit much, but Mr Khattak is just very intense and mature.

His product is called Den and it is even less sexy than Mr Shaw’s. It is a new-style mains socket and light switch that can be switched on and off using a phone app or remote control; the switching is physical, so there is even a proper click. Den will also know which appliances are on and when, what power they are drawing, warn you if something is malfunctioning and so on. It is a clever, appealing and eco-friendly invention, which will be cheap and is designed to fit right into standard mains sockets and light switch holes, so Den-ing a whole house or office will be a breeze.

After a failed attempt at funding Den before Christmas, Mr Khattak tried again in April, with a few twiddles to the proposition — and in hours became the most oversubscribed campaign on start-up platform Seedrs so far, closing at £493,000. He expects to be staffed up and in production next year and everyone — investors, big name collaborators, media — now wants a bit of the young man.

People laugh when pop stars have a biography written at 21 years old, but Mr Khattak’s at 19 is already a genuine story. Despite all the hoo-hah and the interview at the Gherkin, for example, there is only one working prototype of Den, and it lives in a cardboard box. “I built this while I was doing my GCSEs,” he says, sounding a bit like Pitt the Younger in Blackadder.

The key entrepreneurial lesson so far from Mr Khattak — apart from that you can make an impact even while a product is a prototype — is that he did not set out to be a plug tycoon, just a tycoon. Saudi-born, son of a Pakistani doctor, at 14 he was a troublesome boy at a state grammar school, suspended 16 times for insubordination. Fed up with teachers’ pettiness — and, he admits, with being naughty — Mr Khattak resolved to “become someone awesome”. So, inspired by Sir James Dyson’s autobiography Against the Odds , he set out to find a solution to an everyday problem, to cash in and make billions. He says he will put it into teaching entrepreneurship to kids like himself across the world.

“No one wants to get involved in plugs and switches,” he says. “But I was in bed aged about 14, reading a business book, and I didn’t want to get out of bed to turn off the light. So I thought there must be a better way. How about turning off the switch wirelessly?”

Mr Khattak paid for Den’s development by importing headphones and sunglasses from China, starting out with £140 borrowed from his father. “He’d said no. So I started crying and he gave me the money because I was his son and I was upset, not because he thought I could do it.” Within months, he had made £20,000. He later dropped out of school, however, leaving his father incandescent.

Today, his sceptical parent is one of his key advisers. “He does gets upset, though, when I fail to respond to his messages,” Mr Khattak says. “In fact he just texted to say, ‘Find some time for me, you are not Superman yet’.”

Plenty of time for that, I was thinking, as, I’m sure, was Mr Khattak senior.