14 entrepreneurs
All fired up for an assault on the energy market Today’s worldwide energy product market is worth an estimated $50 billion and now taking on the big brands at their own game is Oxfordshire entrepreneur Dr Andrew Guise. He is co-founder of FireStar 'intelligent' energy crystals, a product that he hopes will achieve $250 million sales within the next decade. With investment from a crowdfunding platform and a healthy dose of expertise from his background in finance in lifesciences, the product is already sold online and stocked in one major sports outlet. On the day of the interview, Guise had just returned from a 6am pitch in London, hoping to make the shortlist for the Virgin Media Business VOOM 2016 competition. He credits serendipity and the support of family with giving him a series of lucky breaks throughout his career – Alison Dewar asked him why
With a father who was a quantity surveyor in the oil and gas industry Guise, now 45, spent his early childhood in Dubai before attending boarding school near York. It was an experience he says helped him stand on his own two feet at a young age. His first ambition to be a vet was thwarted by just missing out on the necessary A-level grades, so he went to Bath University to study bio-chemical engineering, attracted not least by the city’s “half-decent” rugby team. A placement with BP was followed by a PhD, before a move into corporate finance which led to a return to his biotech roots. Six years ago, he came up with the idea for FireStar and, after one false start, it is now going full steam ahead at Oxford Science Park. Married to accident and emergency consultant Dr Lizle Blom, Guise is also proud father to what he calls his two-year-old “miracle”, daughter Isabelle.
And from there you went into corporate finance?
Bath had a really good MBA programme. During my time there I was very involved with the student union, helping set up the first postgraduate guild to support mature students. I saw MBAs going off to work in the city, so I decided to follow and wrote over 100 applications. I decided to join Deutsche Morgan Grenfell’s graduate programme, working on mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare and chemical sectors.
What was your first job?
I hated the first year of my degree course but through good luck and bravado I got through it and was very fortunate when BP offered me a position making polyethylene in the south of France for my work placement year. They paid me well – I learnt a language, lived in a great city and learnt to ski for the first time, it was a phenomenal year. By the end of it though, I knew I didn’t want to be a chemical engineer.
So what did you do next?
Serendipity played a huge role. I scraped a 2:1 for my degree and, as I was always interested in biology, decided to try and move into pharmaceuticals. I was told that to really get on I’d need a PhD and I was fortunate enough to be offered a paid research officer post with the university, enabling me to work but use that data as part of my degree studies. It took me those three years to discover bench science was something else I didn’t want to do.
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It was a fantastic opportunity, I was about 25, earning a fairly generous salary working on M&A deals for big corporations, but it was also pretty hard work, you were in the office 8am-10pm every day and one day at weekends, so you had no other life.
I then moved to a purely healthcare role with UBS; it was just as the first technology bubble was taking off. I worked with teams that raised around $2 billion for different companies, executed M&A in many sub- sectors of healthcare, and was leading the day-to-day management of some very large deals – it was very demanding with a lot more responsibility, but also very fulfilling.
The corporate finance market was changing though, and when I was offered the chance to work with a biotech company that I had floated in Holland, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to get back to my science roots. From there, I worked for several more biotechs and latterly floated Thrombogenics on the Belgian stock exchange. I was very lucky to have done very well out of it – not enough to retire, but it enabled me to return to England to my future wife and set up my own consultancy business.
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – JULY/AUGUST 2016
Tell us about FireStar – where did the concept come from?
It was six years ago when I first had the idea. I couldn’t believe how big the energy drinks market had become for products which I saw as being fizzy liquid full of sugar and calories. I thought there had to be a better way of getting caffeine into people, so I set about trying to find it.
The issue is that you need about 60 milligrams of caffeine to have a tangible benefit, but because it is so bitter, you need to be able to disguise the flavour, which we were eventually able to do by encapsulating it. It was real kitchen table stuff, I was experimenting with gums, hard boiled sweets and all sorts of things. Fortunately, as
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