Meet a Sandboxer : Artur Majsterek, Founder : worldeducation.pl, 1eat, arturvoyage

This is part of our Meet a Sandboxer series where we profile young entrepreneurs and innovators from the SandboxNetwork. Sandbox is the leading global community for young achievers and innovators under 30. Click here to read the interview of Antoine Verdon, Cofounder and CEO of Sandbox.Artur Majsterek is a young entrepreneur from Poland currently studying in the UK. At 21 he is the founder of 3 ventures, president of the London School of Economics Entrepreneurs and has traveled to 42 countries. YourStory caught up with Artur to understand more about his ventures.

Tell us more about yourself.

I am 21 years old, love to travel, love food and a little of adventure. Currently a management student of London School of Economics. Heavily involved with many exciting projects.

What are the ventures you have founded/part of?

I have set up http://1eat.co.uk out of a venture which Max Springer and me co-founded at Warwick, it was meant to provide online food delivery system. Soon we moved away from that as working in separate locations did not prove successful. The idea of an eating club came out of the marketing concept which was to get people to want to carry the address of the website in their pockets/wallets. I have come up with an idea, that if they receive a discount they will want to have the membership card always with them. This proved such a colossal task that the food delivery was dropped completely. Of course the team of co-founders was the key success factor the great work of Maria O. Avgoustins K. , Alex M and my brother Adrian.

Now 1eat is growing very rapidly with expanding number of business partners new members and restaurants. We are now concentrating on how we could make a more positive impact on the world through working with businesses which care for sustainability and the well being of our children's world.My other projects are http://worldeducation.pl which helps polish families with the best boarding education for their children in Switzerland and United Kingdom; http://arturvoyage.com which has been co-founded by Jochen Hermanns is a student travel group that aims to make a positive impact on the world through the journeys their undertake. I don't want to keep listing.

At a young age you have started many companies what keeps you going?

I think two forces acting in parallel. One being the push force which is fear of failure and the other the pull force, the desire to succeed in the projects. The first one means that once I started a project, breathed life into it, there is no way to stop it. It lives its own life and it has to be fed with time, care, love and attention.

From the other side, the fun and the kick I get out of little successes is great and motivates me to be more creative and work harder. It is very hard most of the time, combining 3 businesses, one of the biggest student societies (entrepreneurs society http://www.lse-entrepreneur.org and my involvement in International Studies Conference http://internationalstudies.pl, and editing the entrepreneurial section of the London Student Newspaper (http://www.london-student.net/), London ambassador of Sandbox-Network (http://www.sandbox-network.com/)

What are your goals in the near future?

In the near future I would like to concentrate on a small number of things, by finding the right people to give the chance to excel. International Studies Conference 3 for example already has been run by Kacper Trela and the 4th edition has completely new board of organizers. I want to repeat the success of succession in everything which will not be my main focus.

The next step would be then to take 1eat, the real estate and Worldeducation to another level, or even concentrate just on 1 thing, so that I can make that a global success. Christian Busch the co-founder of Sandbox once told me "Most of the young entrepreneurs struggle, they do million of projects, but they can never list 1 very thing they are proud of".

Apart from your ventures what do you like to do in your spare time?

Absolutely love travelling, seeing new places, meeting new people, eating fantastic local dishes its my definition of relaxation. Travel has to be rough, unplanned and as close to the local community as possible this way it’s fun, because there is always something to have a laugh about, for example this one time in Mongolia when the transport who was meant to pick us up from the middle of nowhere back to the capital never arrived and we had to hitchhike on the back of the truck.

my personal site: http://arturmajsterek.comWhat are you plans with 1eat ? Do you want to expand globally? Are you looking for funding?

Plan is to expand, but either organically or through franchises. If it’s the former we would need to wait until enough funds have been earned. For the latter we are happy to consider any proposals of taking the brand to other countries. In fact with Michal Wrobel we are working on expansion to Sweden and Switzerland.

I am currently not looking for funding and probably will not be in the near future.

As a person with so many ideas and startups is there something where you have gone wrong? What has been your learning at a personal level?

hahaha, of course, I always go wrong, ok maybe not always, but certainly most of the time, my favourite motto says 'those who try often fail, but those who never try always fail'. I've learnt you just have to keep trying and if something is not working out then look for modifications, so that you can move forward and have fun. Bringing it back to my passion for travel I find life like a long voyage and certainly when I voyage it’s not so much the destination but the process of getting there that’s fun. Reaching the destination is like icing on top of a cake. It tastes good, but then there is so much more to it.

You have build businesses that involve a lot of interaction and marketing what according to you are the key attributes of a successful entrepreneur?

Ability to balance things like perseverance and willingness to give in, team work with individual strength to support others, working hard and having a splendid time and in the end ability to use luck to move forward.

Also something really crucial is being open to suggestion of fellow peers, in my experience LSE Entrepreneurs and Sandbox provided a great platform where fellow entrepreneurs would help me with strategy, financing or human resource dilemmas.

Check out Artur’s ventures : http://www.1eat.co.uk/card , http://worldeducation.pl/ , http://arturvoyage.com/. Read about him on Sandbox here and visit his website http://arturmajsterek.com