AN ENTREPRENEUR who dropped out of university after failing in school made himself a millionaire by 23 with business-savvy ideas.
Steven Bartlett, 30, has made a name for himself as the youngest-ever investor on Dragons’ Den.
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But his life now is worlds away from his childhood in Plymouth, Devon.
Steven was once expelled from Plymstock School for having very low attendance and barely scraped through his GCSEs and A-levels.
“I was pretty much the only black kid in an all-white school,” Bartlett recalled in an interview with The Sunday Times.
“I was relaxing my hair so that it’s straight, trying to be as white as I possibly could at that age because I didn’t really understand what it was to be different.”
And his attention was focused elsewhere.
“By age 16, I was running pretty much all the school trips in my year group and I would take a cut of the money and give the rest to my school,” he told GQ.
“I was doing all of our school parties. Then I started launching businesses on the internet at about 16 or 17.”
In a bid to change his life after school he enrolled on a marketing course at Manchester Metropolitan but dropped out after just one lecture.
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He then picked up a few marketing gigs before co-founding
Social Chain, a social media agency.
By the time it went public, the company was valued at £200million.
The Mancunian now runs several companies and has also published a book – Happy Sexy Millionaire: Unexpected Truths about Fulfilment, Love and Success.
His podcast, The Diary of a CEO, regularly tops listener number charts.
According to Forbes magazine, the entrepreneur was valued at £71million when he was just 26 years old.
