Acknowledging the incredible people who helped build SkilledUp Life from an idea to reality
Idea conceived by Manoj Ranaweera of Techcelerate whilst having a chat with Anthony Chisnall, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company Driver Net.
At a meeting held to discuss the concept, Manoj invited Ram Raghavan, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company Compaira, and Chris McCarthy, Managing Director of Techcelerate Partner, Focus 5 Recruitment to join to create Furloughed Life, a special project of Techcelerate Ltd.
It was later decided to handover any profits made by the project to an NHS charity. Thomas Porteus, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company Iatro Partners offered free hosting facilities for the project. Later on, Russell Groves, CEO of Techcelerate Tech Company, Training Sensei offered access to his e-learning product free of charge to Volunteers.
Founder & Visionary
CEO, Driver Net
CEO, Compaira
MD, Focus 5 Recruitment
Yogeeta Chirekhani joined to help with social media. During her tenure, she created many digital assets including posting them on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Together we achieved the following results by July 24th, 2020:
"Finding Furloughed.life has really helped me through a pretty difficult time – it's kept me sane, given me a focus and sometimes just having some friendly faces to talk to each week has been invaluable – I'll always be grateful for that, so thank you!"
As the majority of the volunteers were called back from their furloughed positions, a decision was taken to follow a different approach for the development of the next phase.
Manoj built SkilledUp Life and went live on August 1st, 2020 by himself. The platform evolved from Furloughed Life to focus on creating a cluster-based volunteer marketplace for tech startups.
In November 2020, Manoj hired Mithun as the first employee. This marked the beginning of SkilledUp Life's growth as a formal organization.
It took 176 days to acquire 100 Volunteers. With the help of Volunteers, we reached 1,000 Volunteers by end of July 2021, at which point SkilledUp Life Ltd was spun out from Techcelerate Ltd.
In August 2021, we started to build Volunteer teams for ourselves, starting with the HR team. Elise Singleton kick-started this process.
Whilst we are grateful to all volunteers who helped us, below is a list of individuals who provided exceptional help:
We started to focus on building the demand side (companies) on November 1st, 2021. We now have 9 paying customers.
By this date, we reached 2,702 Volunteers from 71 countries, demonstrating the global reach and appeal of the SkilledUp Life platform.
Join thousands of volunteers and companies building the future of tech startups