Mike Southon is a British entrepreneur and author. Education Mike Southon was educated at Papplewick School, Ascot (where he was a contemporary of Richard Curtis) and Wellington College, Crowthorne (where in 1967 he met Chris West, who was to become his co-author). He subsequently attended Imperial College London to read mechanical engineering, but left after a year. He worked at Tate & Lyle Research in Reading for a while and then went on to the University of Bradford to read chemical engineering and management economics. Work Southon was co-founder of The Instruction Set, a Unix training company, in 1984. Other co-founders were Peter Griffiths and Mike Banahan. The company grew to 150 people, then was bought out in 1989 by Hoskyns Group (now part of Capgemini). During the 1990s, he was involved with 17 startup companies, including Riversoft and Micromuse, both of which had public floatations. In 2002, he published The Beermat Entrepreneur with Chris West. This book criticises the approach to entrepreneurship taught in many business schools as excessively corporate, and instead presents a model whereby customers are found as quickly as possible and where formal business planning is only carried out once the entrepreneur is sure of the product and where it fits in the market. The entrepreneur is presented as a specific kind of individual, with strengths and weaknesses (as opposed to models whereby entrepreneurship is seen as a set of behaviours that anyone can carry out). Such a person needs to work with particular individuals at different times in the business' life – with a small group of expert 'cornerstones' at the start, with a 'dream team' of committed, 'can-do' individuals as the company grows to 25 people, then with more conventional employees after that point. Several other books followed, including two 'Beermat Guides' in sales and finance, and a book for intrapreneurs, The Boardroom Entrepreneur. Southon has written regular columns for the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times (weekly, for four years) and Mail on Sunday. He is now one of the most experienced entrepreneur mentors in the UK, having done face-to-face sessions with over 2,000 people in the last fifteen years. He has also spoken at over 1,000 live events, and interviewed many business celebrities on stage, including Sir Richard Branson at the first International Festival of Business in Liverpool, where he was Entrepreneur in Residence for two years In 2018, a thoroughly revised edition of