Leading with James Ashton

S2 Episode 6 - Entrepreneur First and RSPB

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Episode notes

Alice Bentinck and Beccy Speight join James Ashton to discuss campaigning conservation, fashioning leaders from founders and megalomaniac tendencies.

Alice Bentinck is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, a venture that turns talented individuals into entrepreneurs. Since it began in 2011, more than 1,200 people have been through the EF programme, creating 230 start-ups worth a collective $1.5bn.

Bentinck began her career at the consulting firm McKinsey and chose founding EF over a job at Google. She also set up Code First: Girls, a charity that has taught 5,000 girls to computer code for free while at university.

Beccy Speight became chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds earlier this year.

The RSPB is the largest conservation organisation in Europe, with more than 1.2m members, over 2,000 employees and around 12,000 volunteers. It maintains over 200 nature reserves which are home to 80pc of the UK’s rarest or most threatened bird species.

Speight joined the 130-year old charity from the Woodland Trust where she had been chief executive since 2014. Prior to that she spent 14 years at the National Trust, rising to become director for the Midlands region.

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