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Pavir Patel sent the Headmaster this photo of himself, Akshat Sharma and Richard Ou connecting in San Francisco.

Richard (OE 2010-2015) brought us the story behind the image: “All three of us are founders looking to build billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley. Quite a few QE boys that I’ve met in the US have been entrepreneurs, too, all having raised not so insignificant amounts of capital. It feels like we’re following in the footsteps of Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman maybe a few years or a decade behind.

“What I am really excited about is more people from QE coming to the US. I think this is the place to be.”

Pavir (OE 2003–2010) and Akshat (OE 2012–2019) are part of the long-established international Entrepreneur First accelerator, which runs one of its four programmes in San Francisco. “However, they’d not met until after Pavir’s encounter with me,” says Richard. “I met Pavir at a FinTech AI hackathon hosted at the Digital Garage office in San Francisco. The conversation went something like this:”

Richard: “Where in the UK are you from?”

Pavir: “London, what about you?”

Richard: “I’m from London as well. Whereabouts?”

Pavir: “Stratford, and you?”

Richard: “Highgate”

Pavir: “I used to go to school up north of Highgate!”

Richard: “Really, where?”

Pavir: “QE Boys”

Richard: “Holy sh*t, I went to QE as well!”

Richard later met Akshat at the Entrepreneur First office.

As for Pavir and Akshat, they knew each other through being in the same accelerator, but did not realise the full extent of their connection until a conversation in a Waymo (self-driving car) turned to their backgrounds. “It was surreal,” says Akshat. “We were mates already and were speaking about our homes in the UK and school experiences…and there was a moment of realisation of ‘Wait a second – that sounds very familiar’ when we realised we both went to QE!”

Since then, the three have created a group chat and have been expanding it to include more OEs in San Francisco.

Richard said he realised even before going to university where he needed to be to pursue his goal of founding and growing a startup. “I knew that if I wanted to do it, the only place I could was the US. The problem was that education in the US was so expensive – four years of a degree course can easily be $250,000.”

The solution he arrived at was to go to King’s College London, majoring in Physics (“my passion”) for his first degree and then come to the US for a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania – “only two years!” He worked out some further ways to reduce the financial burden, including becoming a Resident Advisor (RA) – a peer mentor for other students – which comes with the major plus that free housing and food are provided.

The idea for his business came about when he graduated from Penn. last year and was looking for a graduation photographer. “I realised it was really hard – there is not really any infrastructure for freelancing.”

With time on his hands, he worked out a plan for a business to put that right, checking that he had a Minimum Viable Business (MVB). He shared the plan with the photographer he had eventually found, Jerry Cai. “As soon as I pitched it to him, he said: ‘I want in.’”

The two became co-founders of Agorum, described on its website as “a freelancer marketplace connecting clients with skilled creatives”. They have started initially by focusing on freelancers who require a physical presence for their work – photographers, DJs and private chefs.

The process has not always been easy. “Funding was difficult at first. We tried raising funds last year when the economy was not doing very well.”

Since then, however, they have been scaling rapidly, and Richard is focused on taking the business global. Agorum was recently valued at $10m.

“I think what changed things was moving to the Bay area: I don’t think there is an eco-system like the Bay’s that exists anywhere else in the world.

He acknowledges the help provided by his accelerator – VIP-X (different from Pavir’s and Akshat’s). VIP-X is run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and caters primarily for people associated with Penn. and Wharton. It takes no equity and offers what are essentially grants, not loans.

“I think one of the hardest parts of doing a startup is the loneliness and distance that comes with it,” says Richard. “Few people can relate.” In particular, he has found the constant need for absolute discretion about his plans for the business hard.  “As the CEO, there is only so much you can ever say.”

“As my role has changed from managing a team of 1.5 people to now a team of ten, the problems are constantly evolving.”

“The thing is persistence,” Richard says, stressing the importance of listening to clients, who sometimes provide the only clue as to a way forward.  “There is something about this gut instinct – and it usually comes from your customer. It becomes your driving force.”

Richard has no doubt as to the source of his strength. “When I look back at my time at QE, it was hard. A lot of homework and pressure. Retrospectively, that is what helped, giving me the resilience I am drawing on now. A lot of people have shared that with me, too. Things were always hard, but that raised your tolerance for a lot of things.”

For his part, Akshat is currently building a company called Orbit. The sad truth about the current digital age is that “we have never been historically unhappier,” he says. “Orbit will empower people by making mental health as transparent and actionable as physical health through a non-invasive brain wearable. Orbit is unlocking cognition by building the first foundation model of the brain!”

In addition to his work with Entrepreneur First, Akshat is part of the first cohort of Founders – the University of Cambridge’s own accelerator programme. He graduated from Cambridge in Biomedical Engineering last year, launching Orbit at the start of 2024.

“At the Neuro Optics Lab [in Cambridge], I developed the first, and only, brain computer interface using HD DOT, a novel imaging approach to track human brain function at comparable resolutions to an fMRI. This modality, being cheap, portable and high resolution, is uniquely positioned to create the foundation model of our brains!”

Akshat has won multiple awards at international conferences and is writing a first-author paper on the subject.

By leveraging the novel wearable technology, Orbit is focussing on making brain-tracking as simple and accessible as Fitbit made fitness-tracking – “all in the comfort of your favourite baseball cap or beanie!” as he puts it.

“With each version, Orbit builds the largest, real-world brain data-sets to unlock new secrets about the way we perceive the world around us – our cognition. It starts by understanding mental workload and aims to progress to complex mental states, including anxiety, stress and depression. Each version helps us regain control of a new emotion, at each step regaining happiness through giving us a deeper understanding and control of our brain.”

Finally, Pavir Patel’s business is Outerop. Like Akshat’s business, it launched at the beginning of this year. Outerop helps grow businesses online using AI, making it easier for them to build high-quality, reliable Large Language Model (LLM) products and to start creating self-optimising LLM pipelines (a series of steps where the output of one is the input of the other). Its slogan is: “Build GenAI products your customers love.”

Since reading Economics at Nottingham, Pavir has, he says, “done all sorts – from incubating J P Morgan’s first AI startup doing NLP; setting up their FinTech team in Asia (Hong Kong was awesome!) and scaling Europe’s leading broker/crypto exchange, Bitpanda Pro, to spinning off a company with a Series A raise [a company’s first significant round of venture-capital financing] to launching an e-commerce business with my wife”.

 

 

Shaun McSweeney (OE 1970–1977) is now volunteering regularly to support QE Collections, working with the School’s archivist, Jenni Blackford, with his personal knowledge of his era already proving valuable in the cataloguing.

Shaun is a History graduate and qualified as a History teacher, even doing some supply teaching at QE in 1983. “Obviously I have a love of history, and I have always been grateful for my education at QE, where I had seven happy years,” he says.

The Headmaster welcomed his involvement: “It is great to have OEs as well as current students with interest in helping with the important work of archiving, and I am sure Shaun’s first-hand knowledge of some of the events he is cataloguing will be helpful in ensuring that QE Collections remains an authoritative source of information on our history.”

Notwithstanding the fact that he personally enjoyed his School years, QE itself declined while Shaun was a pupil, he says. “I entered the School in 1970, which was the last grammar-school entry before the School went comprehensive in 1971. Sad to say, I witnessed an obvious deterioration in behaviour and academic standards in the following years, such that when I was in the Lower Sixth, I was one of the sixth-formers who volunteered to help with remedial English classes for the more junior boys.” The School reverted to a fully selective admissions system under Headmaster Eamonn Harris in 1994.

“In my last year , a very young teacher took my A-level English class. His name was Eric Houston. I wonder what became of him!” Shaun took his degree at London University and initially embarked on a teaching career. “But the 1980s were a difficult time to be a History teacher and in 1988 I joined HM Customs and Excise – which eventually became HM Revenue and Customs – then Border Force, spending a total of 35 years before retiring in 2023. I had many jobs, including plain clothes work for five years. Without going into too many details, I uncovered a link between bootlegging (i.e. the smuggling of alcohol and tobacco products from Europe into the UK) and the funding of terrorism in Northern Ireland which resulted in a security alert of the highest level and I was advised to check underneath my car for bombs!

“I was stationed at Heathrow Airport from 2006 to 2023, spending most of my time dealing with cargo ‘exams’. Freight is where the majority of smuggled goods are found, not the passenger terminals. I had plenty of seizures of drugs and cigarettes, and huge amounts of counterfeit goods. Work continued through the Covid lockdown  – no working at home for us – and that resulted in vast quantities of counterfeit face masks and Covid test kits being seized.”

The archiving work does have its emotional side, he says. “Looking at old documents, I can’t help thinking that nearly everyone I knew in them is now dead. There was one teacher who tragically took his own life, and another who ended up in prison. And those two events happened while I was still a pupil. Rather depressing! But reading these documents also recalls many stories about my time at QE, some of which bring a smile to my face.”

 

Eighteen years after leaving QE, Warren Balakrishnan is loving family life in New York, from where he is growing an international insurance business.

“I’ve wanted to contribute to the School in a meaningful way for some time, and living in the US makes it a bit harder to join events there, so it felt serendipitous to receive an email for the 450 Club.” (The club, which was set up ahead of QE’s 450th anniversary last year, was for those making a contribution to the School of at least £450.)

Warren (Warendra, OE 1999–2006) says he has good reason for gratitude to his alma mater. “I screwed up my first year A-level exams – not turning up to class and assuming you know the material is a high-risk / low-reward strategy, no matter how intelligent you are! Eric Houston took me into a meeting and told me it would be a complete waste of a line on the UCAS form to apply to Oxford with those first-year A-level results. Needless to say, I took the bait, and stormed off in indignation, telling him I’d prove him wrong. I think Eric knew me better than I knew myself at that point, and that this is true for a lot of the teaching faculty at QE – that’s what made it such an incredible formative experience.” Warren duly went on to get the grades he needed to read Law at St John’s College, Oxford.

Graduating in 2009 in the midst of the great financial crisis, he counts himself fortunate to have received the offer of a training contract at a US law firm. “I thoroughly enjoyed being a corporate lawyer focussing on the significant amount of financial services M&A activity as a result of the crisis.” After qualifying as a solicitor, he was seconded to a private-equity-owned insurance business headquartered in the UK to help them raise capital, set up their fund, and carry out their initial acquisition of an insurance business in the US. The secondment turned into a job offer involving Warren leaving his legal role and joining the business unit. (“Side note: If the notion of being principal, not agent, appeals to you, being a corporate lawyer may not be the best long-term career path.”)

“I have never felt so terrified in my work place as I was when I started my new commercial role, taking out a blank piece of paper and staring at it very hard for over two weeks, as I contemplated: ‘Well, they hired me to make money, right? Now, how exactly is it that I make money for the company?’ Thankfully, you learn as you go, and after over a decade at the company, I am sure I have a long way to go before I can drop pearls of wisdom, but I have had a tonne of fun being a founding member of, and growing, an international insurance business with over $100bn of assets.” Warren is today Chief Development & Strategy Officer with that company, Resolution Life, a giant of the insurance world.

“In all of this, one thing has stuck with me as I reflect on my career: when you decide to do a task, do the best you can at it, and success, plaudits and recognition often follow,” he says.

Life in New York with his wife and children has a major benefit to counter the disadvantages: “It forces individuals and families to utilise public outdoor spaces to gather. We have met many of our friends in the kids’ sandbox in the public gardens and playgrounds. The food, culture, and, of course, the career opportunities are incredible in New York, and there really is a neighbourhood for everyone. My wife and I are, however, confronting the sad fact that our children are learning American English.” He has made it his mission to police their pronunciation of ‘water’ – “I will correct them till I die!

“For any younger OEs, I’d strongly recommend living and working in at least one different country. I am a firm believer that it firstly helps develop a world-view based on a broader set of experiences; secondly, it enables you to be a better leader of people across cultures and values; thirdly and most importantly, it is a lot of fun and should be seen as a great adventure!”

Warren knows of a few OEs dotted across the States – and is confident there are more. “I randomly met Jonathan Cohen (OE 2000–2004) in the elevator of a Bermuda hotel last year when he had just moved back from the US to the UK.” The photo above shows Warren with Sunil Tailor (OE 1999–2006) and Neil Yogananther (OE 1999–2006) in November 2023.

 

Retired since 2020 from his position as Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Calgary, Canada, Roger Thomas (OE 1952–1960) continues both to teach medical students and to conduct research – his current work is a study of 230,000 patients aged 65 and over.

The winner of multiple awards, including 19 teaching awards, Roger taught firstly at Yale, then at various universities in Canada over a 53-year career, with 1980–1983 spent at a hospital in Malawi. QE, he says, had a large effect on his life: he has penned his memories of the years he and his brother, Andrew, spend at Queen’s Road.

Roger’s account

“Mr Ernest Jenkins was a unique and highly motivated and excellent History teacher and Headmaster . I had no idea what a mentor was: I realised later how important his encouragement was, because he arranged for me to take the admission tour through Oxford and Cambridge colleges that he selected. His goal was to get as many boys as possible into Oxford and Cambridge. Due to the calibre of  his teaching, I achieved Scholarship-level History, an A in A-level History, a State Scholarship and an Exhibitionship at Magdalene, Cambridge.

The students were generally extremely obedient. Mr Jenkins told the School one day that a lady had written to him and ‘three boys had walked along the pavement and forced her thus into the road’. No-one owned up, so the entire School of 650 boys attended one Saturday afternoon and stood on tables for three hours with their hands on the tops of their heads. Mr Jenkins had absolute control by force of personality. He played the grand piano every morning for prayers, and when singing Bring my spear, O clouds unfold [from the hymn, Jerusalem], the boys tried once to slow down on the “O clouds”, but a look from Mr Jenkins said: “Don’t try that again.”

Mr Jenkins’ prize day featured orations in Greek, Latin, German and French (I was assigned to memorise a speech from General de Gaulle’s memoirs): Mr Jenkins reminded boys who forgot a line, sotto voce.

We paraded on the sports field annually for Founder’s Day. There was a speech which always mentioned “a fishmonger of Barnet”. Boys inevitably fainted in the heat despite instructions to rise regularly on their toes. We marched to the parish church for the service.

I thought some of the masters could have had academic careers if they had wished and had there been more opportunities in universities at that time. We knew very little of their personal lives. We also wondered if the catapults and other toys apprehended from the boys and placed in the master’s desk drawer, if not returned, perhaps went to those masters who had children.

We did exactly what we were told. The teachers were all highly motivated and prepared lessons carefully. Having taught medical students and registrars for decades, I know how much thought and preparation have to go into any presentation if it is to have any lasting teaching effect. The Physics and Chemistry laboratories were well equipped and we did many useful experiments.

My memories of lessons include the following:

• The Physics master one day decided we would all write a 100-page essay and we were issued a book. I unfortunately decided to write The history of the universe and carefully illustrated it. Some cleverer boys chose instead topics like The motor car and, for example, stretched a picture of a piston over two pages;
• I remember one lesson when the Headmaster threw the map of Europe on to the table and took us through Napoleon’s campaigns. He was reported to have been the captain of a minesweeper in World War I;
• Mr Wingfield had been a tank commander in Italy and could easily be redirected to stop the Latin lesson with a request to “Please tell us about when you attacked Anzio”;
• We wondered from where the Biology master got his supply of dead cats for dissection;
• The Greek master, “Tiger” Timson, had only to look at a student to get obedience;
• In contrast, kindly Mr Woodbridge, the German master, offered to mark my German O-level exercises as I decided to take it as an extra subject from home;
• Two of the French masters for some reason had the poorest luck with control. On Saturday mornings, we read the magazine La France, with enough copies only for one per two boys. The master’s command to change them over led to the uncontrolled shunting of desks for about 15 minutes. He was reported to have left due to a breakdown. Another master tried to make lessons interesting with small French objects in envelopes that were passed round the class for us to name them in French. However, the boys deliberately mixed up the objects and “lost” the handle for the gramophone which signalled to move the objects round.

Lines were a key way of enforcing discipline. They could be either prose (no poetry, as it could be remembered and written more easily) or equally spaced tiny dots.  One could get 200 lines just for turning round in class. If required to write more than 600 lines per term, you would probably be caned with ‘six of the best’. This was in the Masters’  room: the rule was the cane could not be lifted higher than the master’s shoulder. We were asked to write  a magazine: one boy drew a person on a bicycle and a sign ‘to the bogs’, but this reference to toilets got him caned.

My memories of ‘illegal’ activities amount only to some boys secretly smoking in the World War II anti-aircraft gun emplacement, one boy offering to steal pens from a stationery store, and another offering to rent out a magazine, Health and Efficiency, with pictures of naked ladies, for sixpence a night.

Sports were compulsory, and included Saturday afternoon. Getting to rugby required a three-mile trek through fields full of cattle and cowpats, and jumping over brooks. There was also cricket, swimming, track and cross-country. The cross country was over the area of the Battle of Barnet 1381. “Sid”, the Chemistry master supervised the cross-country, but chose to do so by bike and did not observe the short cuts the runners took. Swimming included plunging in November into a freezing pool full of green vegetation.

There was no careers counselling. All my family members left school at 14 except my uncle. He wanted to study engineering at Birmingham University, but the fees were greater than my grandfather’s annual wage as a shunter. My uncle was a self-taught engineer who rose to be head of BSA and one of the key Brockhouse engineering firms, and sold machine tools to Mercedes, Volvo, Renault and in the US. When I was at Yale, he regularly wrote me to obtain engineering books from the bookstore. My mother thought I should be a Post Office engineer (she had been a telephone receptionist and worked her way up to be office manager of an engineering firm) or a rock star.  I mention this because there may be many current boys who have no career counselling from their families, and counselling would open their eyes. Some may have very bright and motivated parents who are blocked by an inadequate education.”

 

 

Pupils from across the first three years of Queen Elizabeth’s School had their achievements recognised and lauded at the 2024 Junior Awards.

At an afternoon ceremony held in the Main School Hall, boys gathered with their families and with staff and dignitaries to celebrate.

There were prizes for all the classroom subjects, as well as House prizes, prizes for commitment, and prizes for extra-curricular activities, such as debating & public speaking, and chess. Music prizewinners from Years 7, 8 and 9 punctuated the programme with a series of musical interludes. A vote of thanks was given by the Year 7 debating & public speaking prizewinner, Aaron Singh.

Headmaster Neil Enright spoke about how the prizewinners are seen by others; guest of honour Asif Ahmed (OE 1997–2004) about how they see themselves; and the Mayor of Barnet, Councillor Tony Vourou, about how the whole School is seen in the borough: there is, he said, considerable pride in QE and the achievements of its students.

In his introduction to the ceremony, Mr Enright told the boys: “These awards are a signal that you are doing very well indeed and that we see in you qualities that set a positive example for others in the School – so many of whom are also very talented and hard working.”

He spoke about the butterfly effect, which argues that small things can end up having significant impacts, citing the famous story of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world and a hurricane developing in another.

He urged the boys to small acts of kindness – “a quiet, unshowy altruism” – to benefit those around them, whether at School or elsewhere.

“With your abilities, many of you may go on to make the discoveries, find the cures, engineer the projects, secure the investments of the future. There should be no ceiling to your aspirations. But, with certainty, everyone here and in our Elizabethan community can do the little things in daily life so that things are better for others, or at least,” he added, quoting from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “that things are ‘not so ill as they might have otherwise been’.”

Guest of honour Asif leads the accounting and advisory team at major accountancy firm Cooper Parry which focuses on venture capital-backed founders of companies. He is also the author of best-selling book The Finance Playbook for Entrepreneurs. An accomplished sportsman, he is now part of the Board at Middlesex County Cricket Club.

In his speech, he included many biographical elements from his Schooldays, mentioning being made form captain in Year 7, playing cricket for Middlesex and rugby for Hertfordshire, being appointed a Lieutenant, and achieving good grades.

“At all those milestones, including being appointed Lieutenant, I never shook the feeling of looking around me and thinking: ‘When will you get found out, you absolute fraud?’” he said.

After leaving School, while still training for his professional qualifications with large accountancy firm PwC, his father was diagnosed with a terminal illness. “I unexpectedly found myself in a position at 22 years old, looking after his very small accounting firm. There I was, no clue in the world, with nothing and really no-one to rely upon. The imposter syndrome kicked in again.”

Over time, however, Asif succeeded in building up the business, wrote his best-selling book, and was approached by a much larger firm with an offer to buy his company. “Today, I am a Partner of that firm and I lead the largest team and portfolio of high-growth technology businesses in the country, working with the best entrepreneurs in this land.”

He told the boys all this, because, he said: “I’ve come to realise that imposter syndrome is the world’s way of telling you that other people see something in you that you yourself can’t see…yet. When you are rewarded, you absolutely must savour it, hold it tightly and mark it out as one step closer to fulfilling your destiny.”

The afternoon’s music was a varied selection – including Stravinsky, Gershwin and Mozart alongside a piece by the rather less well-known Polish composer, Szymanowski.

Because of the inclement weather, the reception, normally held on Stapylton Field, took place this year in the Mayes Atrium.

• Click on the thumbnails below to view the images at full size.