Today’s guest and your Mentor for the next 40 minutes is the ever so inspiring author of “The Business of Sharing” and Founder and CEO of Beam – Alex Stephany.
Having started his career as a lawyer, living and working all over the world, Alex decided to join the tech startup JustPark as their COO in 2011. Alex was promoted to CEO at the end of 2012 and let the business to close the largest start up equity crowdfunding raise in history.
Following his success with JustPark, where he remains a board advisor to this day, Alex ventured out on his own and started Beam – the world’s first crowdfunding platform that helps homeless people to train up and get back into work.
Beam’s growing community of supporters have made a total of 17,000 donations, helping almost 200 people find stable employment in a position that will provide a living wage. Beam hasn’t grown unnoticed, winning lots of plaudits in the press and it has won many awards, including being named by The Guardian as one of the most important social tech innovations of 2018.
I loved finding out more about Beam and Alex’s diverse experiences. In our conversation, we talked about many different aspects of his career, including:
- The skills that helped Alex switch from working as a lawyer to a high-growth tech startup and the challenges he faced in the early days of JustPark
- How he became a thought leader on the sharing economy and how this led him to write and publish his book, “The Business of Sharing” (which involved him interviewing some very high profile people, which we discuss during our chat)
- And also his ideas on how everyone can get involved in the sharing economy and how we can find long-term solutions for the homelessness problem, including ways to get involved with his amazing business Beam
Alex’s passion for using technology to connect people who want to help, with people who need help, is both inspiring and contagious.
I am so glad I get to share our conversation with you and I hope you’ll be as inspired as I was after hearing Alex’s story.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please do get in touch at ku.oc.cmbj@semaj, and please also check out and support Beam if you can so we can all do our bit to help tackle the homelessness problem.
If you want to find out more about Alex check out his LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexstephany/
If you want to find out more about Beam you can have a look at their website – https://beam.org/
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