The Bathtub 2 Boardroom story

Bathtub 2 what?

Our name is definitely a good conversation starter!

By jumping into the Tub, you can take that eureka moment you had in the bath and build it into a business reality: From Bathtub 2 Boardroom!

We’re a small charity with a BIG vision

Our mission is to make starting a business affordable, accessible and supported for ALL and to ensure the skills required to become an entrepreneur are an integral part of education.

We do this 3 ways

1. Affordable memberships

This includes community support, meeting rooms, mentoring, events, talks, caffiene and no hidden costs, allowing the best start for you & your business. Find out more about our membership here.

2. The Bathtub Bursary

We remove any financial barrier for those who haven’t had natural access to the opportunities to start a business. Find out more about the Bathtub Bursary here.

3. Inspiring the next generation

We offer students unprecedented access to startups, improving their employability and understanding of opportunities beyond education. Find out more how we do this below.

Inspiring the next generation

At Bathtub 2 Boardroom we want to help young people today develop their own entrepreneurial skill-set in order to thrive in tomorrow’s economy.

We believe that by making a connection between young people and entrepreneurs, through mentoring, work experience and talks by start-up founders, we can help young people understand the many diverse opportunities that exist in the start-up and entrepreneur world and increase their employability skills through working with real businesses.

As a Bathtub 2 Boardroom Member we would love for you to be involved in inspiring students we work with – be it offering internships, mentoring, or work experience, we want to find a partnership that works for you and offers value to them.

Our story

The idea: In 2010, our Founders Fred & Ed (pictured below) were trying to find an affordable space where they could build their own start-ups. 

 

Workspaces existed but they were few and far between and most were expensive or took more equity than new businesses could afford to give. They got creative in finding a solution to their problem and soon ended up ‘floor-sitting’ in an empty building in Kings Cross.

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As word spread amongst their friends and beyond, a community of passionate, determined entrepreneurs was born and incredible businesses like Escape the City and Pavegen were given their first homes.

 

Fred & Ed realised that being a part of a community of like-minded entrepreneurs was making the world of difference to these businesses – what if it could be made accessible and affordable, especially for those who deserve it the most? It was this that sparked Fred and Ed’s eureka moment and Bathtub 2 Boardroom was born.

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Our history: In 2010, Fred & Ed found Bathtub’s first home; ‘The Bathtub’ – a vast floor in the newly refurbished 210 Pentonville Road office block. Then followed The Church on Vyner Street, in East London (East Tub) and The Mini Tub on the vibrant Rivington Street in Shoreditch. They soon registered as a charity to ensure social impact through enterprise would always be at the core of everything Bathtub 2 Boardroom d0es.

 

In 2014 Bathtub expanded into City Tub, in a beautiful Grade II listed building based in central London near Bank. In the midst of enormous corporate Head Quarters, you could find a hidden gem of creativity, diversity, over 100 start-ups and tribes of people defining their careers on their own terms.

In 2018 we opened our now thriving Tech City Tub, based within a college between Angel and Old Street. This took our total membership capacity to over 400 members, making us one of the largest ‘bricks & mortar’ entrepreneurship communities and co-working space operators in London.

 

Our move to Tech city Tub has set us on a mission to inspire the next generation of innovators, makers and entrepreneurs; working closely with the college and our growing number of entrepreneur ‘Tubbers’ to help young people develop their own entrepreneurial skill-set in order to thrive in tomorrow’s economy.

We’ve supported over 250 businesses to date to create over 300 jobs and raise over £7.5 million in seed funding. We also currently support 19 businesses on our pilot Bathtub bursary programme – a number we hope to triple by the end of 2017!