'UK's youngest self-made billionaire' shares how food poisoning sparked business
The UK's youngest self-made billionaire has opened up on how he made a life-changing fortune while working from his girlfriend's bed.
Tech boss Johnny Boufarhat founded online events platform Hopin aged 26 - a business that now worth a whopping £1.7billion.
Now 29, he is from humble beginnings, having been born in Australia after his parents fled the 1990s civil war in Lebanon.
Johnny's dad was a mechanical engineer in the Middle Eastern country, reports the Daily Star, while his Syrian-born Armenian mother was an accountant.
He came to the UK in his teens to study mechanical engineering at Manchester University - but when a bout of bad food poisoning confined him to his girlfriend's flat in King's Cross, London a few years later, Johnny decided to try his hand at making apps.
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The billionaire came to the UK in his teens to study mechanical engineering at Manchester University (HOPIN)Boufarhat told The Sunday Times that he was so sick he was unable to leave the bed - and felt lonely and isolated.
But the video-conferencing app Hopin took him took him to the heights of the boardroom in just a few years, and The Sunday Times reports that Boufarhat has now made about £162.5million from selling shares in the firm.
Interest in the service boomed during the Covid pandemic, when people around the world were forced to find new ways to communicate in the face of lockdown restrictions.
Video conferencing app Hopin boomed during the pandemic (HOPIN)He still owns about 42% of the business to this day, and says its commercial has allowed him to live out his dream.
In a 2021 interview with the newspaper he confessed that he never liked the idea of working for someone else, saying: “Then I got so sick I was unable to leave my bed. I was starting to get weird reactions, like rashes from the sun.
Boufarhat ranks 102nd on The Sunday Times Rich List 2023 (Hopin)"My brain fog was so severe I couldn’t remember things. I felt like I had some sort of dementia. And I had lost trust with doctors.”
He snapped another six tech businesses that same year, and said he would have preferred to float the company on the UK stock market - but believes that British investors are more conservative that their counterparts.
Boufarhat is worth £1.714bn and ranks 102nd on The Sunday Times Rich List 2023.
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