Chris Hulatt was just 23 when he decided corporate life wasn’t for him. He’d spent two-and-a-half years on Mercury Asset Management’s grad program. It was long enough to meet cofounders Simon Rogerson and Guy Myles, and long enough to know he wanted out.
“Everyone thought we were totally mad,” Hulatt recalled of the moment the three of them dropped out of the coveted grad program to launch Octopus Investments at the turn of the millennium.
They didn’t have a grand business plan or any investors lined up—just $25,000 of Hulatt’s savings, what they now call the “Terminator gene” and zero desire to ever return to the corporate world.
“We thought: ‘Why don’t we have a crack at starting our own fund management business?’ You know, one of those kinds of rash things that people sometimes decide to do,” Hulatt told Fortune.
“We didn’t want to get a traditional job again.”
