James Farha

Hi, I'm James Farha. I'm in London and I'm an entrepreneur.

So the job of an entrepreneur, I'd say, is mostly around connecting people up, bringing people into the company that I started, whether to work for us, to invest in us, or to be our customers.

And my job is to sit in the middle and try and make all those things happen, preferably at the right time, or all together.

I don't have a very standard format for a day, so I do a mix between things in London and things at our research facility in Reading.

Some days we're out, we make underwater drones that take inspiration from nature. So they're basically robot stingrays.

And we spend a lot of time in a lake just outside Reading where we test them. So quite a lot of the time I spend outside demoing the system to people, talking with the engineering team.

And then when I'm in London, where I spend a lot of time, then it's usually meeting with customers, meeting with potential partners or investors.

So at the moment we are taking our product to market for the first time. And as a result, I work a lot with our engineering team. Most of our team are engineers now. So we're a team of 10. Seven of them are engineers. And so I work with them every day on helping them solve problems, think about the product and the right way to

solve our commercial goals together. And then the other people I work with are mostly our customers, advisors, and some of our investors.

Well, I think making robot manta rays actually is a really exciting and fun thing to do!

The highlight is always when I see one of our systems switch on and go in the water and start swimming naturally. I find that very exciting.

There's a category of things that you just can't avoid doing that you have to do that are effectively, you know, corporate chores and when you've got interesting, exciting things to do elsewhere, it's hard to turn your attention at the end of the day to doing all the chores.

But if you don't do them, then the company suffers and you're less likely to achieve your goal. So that's my least favourite thing for sure.

So I would say, as with most people, it was very much not a straight line. I started off, I studied English and Arabic at university, ended up becoming a lawyer, had a brief stint working in technology companies as a product manager and then ended up back as a lawyer working with technology companies.

The current company that I started was one of my clients as a lawyer and I got an opportunity to step in and help start the company and then run it. And so I've been doing that for the last two years.

I think it helped in a lot of ways and then there were a few areas that I would have loved my school education to prepare me more.

You know, all of the soft skills of thinking on your feet, answering under pressure, presenting, all of those things are fantastic and I think anyone who's going through school at the moment should definitely throw themselves into those and not to think too much about their career in the future because you probably don't know where it's gonna take you.

I think that some of the things that I would have liked to just have a better handle on would be how I thought about my career. So having said, don't think too much about your career, I would have liked probably just to have a bit more of a goal and thoughts about how to achieve it and be less reactive.

And I think I was sort of... my education was very humanities based and so I wasn't really thinking when I started my career about what I was actually trying to achieve. And it's only really the last three to five years that I've started thinking much more about how to achieve it.

It's much more satisfying if you're trying to achieve something and making some progress against it than if you're just doing jobs because you think that that's what you should be doing.

So in the current company, what we're doing is really interesting because we're proving for the first time that fins are more efficient and better in a lot of different ways than propellers doing certain things underwater.

And I think in a world where there's a lot more attention being put on the underwater world and people are starting to think how they can access it more regularly, the impact, the negative impact that we could have on the ocean environment is very significant if we just carry on doing things the way that we've been doing them until now.

I think what fins (fin-based propulsion) offers us is a chance to do things with a much lower impact on the natural environment, both in terms of just being more efficient, being much quieter, and having a lower footprint, or a signature as some people say, as we move through the underwater world.

That, I think, is what our company's contribution will be over the next 5 or 10 years.

There are lots that usually centre around experiences with people.

Yeah, I mean, there's always the moment you get your first job. I accepted my first job as a lawyer the day that Lehman Brothers went under, partly because I thought I was having a great time with two job offers on the table. And then I woke up to the news that half of my friends who were working at Lehman Brothers were packing boxes and leaving the building. So I accepted the job straight away and they hadn't rescinded it, which I was quite grateful for.

But then as you sort of... every time you think you've climbed a mountain you see that there's another mountain on the other side to climb. There's always a bigger mountain up ahead and sometimes just when that comes into view and you see that that's possible, you know, that's exciting, it's something that stays with you.

So there's not one, so far not one thing that has really struck me as being the most significant, but I think there's a long accumulation of things that when you look back, you wouldn't believe that they were things that you would do or be involved in.

And it's actually very exciting to look back in that way. And hopefully that continues for as long as possible.

I think that the way you go about the first few years of your career when you leave leave school or university are not the time necessarily to think purely about being happy. You should think about doing the most useful thing that you can with yourself and learning as much as you can.

I think your education continues till you're about, well, it continues through your whole life, but I think your formation probably continues to 30 and maybe beyond in order to be really effective.

And I've just turned 40 and I'd say, you know, I feel like the 10 years ahead of me are probably much more important than the 20 years that are behind me in terms of what I'm going to do next in my career. It's easy to underestimate just how young you are all the way through your career probably until it's over and how much there is to learn.

So I think just go for it, go for the best opportunities that you can as early as you can and don't be afraid of doing well and succeeding early on even if other people are doing things differently.