Entrepreneurs
Awakening the Entreprenurial Spirit
The entrepreneurial mind-set is part of the genetic makeup of family business. It is what lies at the heart of a family business. Every family business started with an idea and one person (or a group of people), who had the drive to make it happen and the willingness to take a risk.
At FBN, we awaken and support the entrepreneurship spirit in different ways:
The FBN NxG Lombard Odier NxG Award
The NxG Award was created in 2009 with the purpose of championing young entrepreneurial family business members. Building on 10 years of successful entrepreneurial stories, the Award fosters a community of young NxG entrepreneurs within the global network.
"A great opportunity to present a project in front of such a big and influential audience."
"The whole process of applying was most rewarding."
The FBN NxG Entrepreneurship Day
The NxG Entrepreneurship Day celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit. Held in different countries around the world, the event is designed to connect different members of the entrepreneurial community. Participants include NxGs creating intra- and entrepreneurial projects inside and outside their family businesses, VC investors, family offices or foundations looking to invest in start-ups, strategists, mentors, and those seeking to rekindle or awaken the spirit of entrepreneurship in their own families.
"You know that people really understand what it means to be an entrepreneur… You can really speak truly about difficulties and what you’re trying to achieve."
For further information about the FBN entrepreneurs community, please write us at: entrepreneurship@fbn-i.org
Selin Yigitbasi-Ducker
4G, YASAR HOLDING A.S, TURKEY. CO-CHAIR FBN ENTREPRENEURS COMMUNITY
Selin is an award-winning social entrepreneur whose aim is to engage as many people as possible to create a better world. She started Goodsted with the mission to build the most accessible and diverse platform for individuals and organisations to collaborate on social and environmental goals.
Goodsted is an impact enablement platform for businesses to achieve ESG and social value targets. Businesses can engage colleagues, customers, suppliers or partners, and share their skills & expertise to support impact startups and non-profits. The platform helps to easily report on all the engagement and impact, and scale programmes effectively. Goodsted is not only a business solution - it's also an open social network for all individuals to progress causes they care about.
Born in Izmir, Turkey, and currently living in London, she has a multi-disciplinary background in business, branding, and design & innovation, and she made the leap from working as a Marketing Manager in brand consultancy to study her MA in Design & Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London to then starting working on starting Goodsted in 2018. She has been full-time with Goodsted since raising a pre-seed round in 2020. Selin won the FBN NxG Lombard Odier Award in 2018, and carried on to win the CampdenFB Top Next-Generation Entrepreneur Award in 2019.
She is the fourth generation member of Yasar Holding A.S., which through its subsidiaries, engages in the food and beverage, coating, tissue, and tourism businesses.
Oliver Laiho
3G, LAIHO INDUSTRIES OY, FINLAND. CO-CHAIR FBN ENTREPRENEURS COMMUNITY
Oliver is a 3rd generation entrepreneur from Finland. His family is a manufacturer of water piping equipment as well as high precision cnc-machining. From the factory floor it was natural to pick-up the passion for manufacturing processes, industrial scale productions and technology.
Currently, half of the year Oliver is engaging in a mission to build the “best summer job for young people from young people”. In front of Helsinki there is a new island being developed for tourism and the entrepreneurial opportunities on the island are abundant. Oliver is building a system where young people get to take responsibility, lead and build projects in a relatively low risk and high reward environment.
The two main projects at the moment are a restaurant and a new cafe that is opening on the last day of June. During the winters when the island is not accessible he is actively exploring different possibilities to enhance the food production and consumption. He is an angel investor in a vertical farming company that’s aiming to ease the farm related pollution of the Baltic Sea by growing microgreens without fertilizer and excessive nutrients.
After studying international business and computer science in Santa Barbara, California he went to the University of Jyväskylä to study information systems sciences. While in school he founded his first company Babylonia Capital to lower the barrier for entry to the newly established crypto market. The company turned out to be the first asset management company in Finland in that sector and paved the way for Finnish crypto legislation and for new companies to enter. The same changing regulatory landscape he was helping to build ended up forcing him to close down the business.