Grace and Femi Owolade’s ‘Tech London Advocates: Young Entrepreneurs’ to be launched at UAL CCI

Hosted by UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, the Young Entrepreneurs branch of Tech London Advocates - founded by tech educators and advocates Grace Owolade and her 15-year-old son, Femi – will launch 23 September during London Tech Week. They hope that UAL students will join this exciting new network that promises to showcase their talent to a global audience.

Tech London Advocates are a collection of tech leaders, experts and investors. The Young Entrepreneurs (TLA:YE) branch will be a space for the new generation within the group. The mission driving it is to inspire, support and connect young entrepreneurs and innovators by building an inclusive ecosystem, working towards the United Nations’ sustainable development goals and to facilitate and promote young entrepreneur networks globally.

The launch event will feature an impressive panel of young tech entrepreneurs from around the world, discussing success and failure, as well as lightning talks from an array of tech leaders, ending in a micro-masterclass from TikTok on how to promote your business on the platform.

The mother-and-son team behind the new branch of Tech London Advocates have become key players in the tech community over the last few years, ever since Femi wandered off to the computers during a maths conference to play Minecraft at just 8 years old. He was shown how to manipulate the code of the game using Python and found that through just a few lines of code, he could change the contents of the game.

From there, Femi and Grace got into coding using Raspberry Pi - a credit-card sized computer you can use to learn programming through practical projects. Grace became a certified Raspberry Pi educator and before they knew it, they were running physical computing workshops around the UK.

Around 6 years later and having led countless workshops and keynote speeches for both corporate companies and public organisations, Grace and Femi have become a formidable team. They have founded a youth-led inclusive Young Coders community and worked with Tate Modern as part of their group South London Raspberry Jam – an autism and Tourette’s syndrome-friendly branch of the Raspberry Pi network – here in the UK. They have also shared their expertise globally, with Femi delivering a coding bootcamps and keynote speeches in San Francisco all the way to Bosnia and Bangkok. At the age of 12, Femi was named as one of Tech London Advocates’ ‘25 under 25’ – its list of the capital’s young tech talent integral to the future of the UK digital sector. This is just naming a few of the pair’s amazing achievements and projects.

UAL spoke to Grace and Femi about TLA: Young Entrepreneurs, getting young people into tech and why it’s so important to do so.

What is the Young Entrepreneurs branch of Tech London Advocates, and why are you launching it? 

“TLA:YE will be an ecosystem of young entrepreneurs - for young entrepreneurs to network and showcase their work and for stakeholders to come in and interact with them. Often, young entrepreneurs are the early adaptors and disruptors, adopting new technologies and embracing new ways of working.

We want to build a peer-to-peer community - these amazing young innovators can sometimes feel a bit isolated. What we want to do is provide that community where they feel comfortable to ask questions, make comments and discuss their experiences within a tight-knit community.

We’re also going to build a directory of young entrepreneurs so investors, employers and clients can see who they might want to work with - who wouldn’t want access to that? The tech industry really wants to tap into this young talent - it's crucial because for them to future proof themselves, they need to attract this young talent.”

We want to make sure that, at its center, it is about diversity and inclusion - we want to make visible those underrepresented groups. We focus a lot on diversity and inclusion, unconscious bias and things like that. That's part of our DNA, and I feel like it’s part of CCI’s as well, so it's very natural to have our Tech London Advocates branch launch at CCI.”

What are the barriers for young people getting into tech? 

“Some young people have very low expectations of - and aspirations for - themselves. They feel that the tech revolution is not for them – when it so is, 100%. We need to help them raise their expectations and aspirations, and to do that they need positive role models that look like them, who they can relate to. They can see that someone has not come from an affluent background and didn’t get great schooling, but they’ve set up a Fintech company. We really want to have these role models that absolutely show you can make it.

There are also other areas like human capital and not knowing the right language to use. Geography is also a factor – the great thing about what we do is that, quite often, we do remote stuff so we can work with any local community. We have people from China joining us, from India, from Ghana so it’s not about geography – we can work in any area. It’s all about levelling up in your community, rather than it being a drain.

We hope to overcome some of the indirect and direct discrimination, because we can build those networks and connections for people that those in certain privileged groups may have and take for granted.”