Hello lovely people!

Yes you are reading the theme correctly. We are falling into autumn and with the colder months approaching it’s time to metaphorically hide your nuts🥜. 

But what does that even mean?

Unlike many animals, squirrels, those cute creatures in parks and up in trees, do not hibernate. In fact, they keep up their relentless hustle → inspirational!

To prepare for the rougher seasons, squirrels bury food, grow a thicker coat, build insulated nests, and fatten up.

Now, how does that apply to founders and artists? 

Well, after the highs of summer it’s time to get your head down. University begins and everyone is back to finding their rhythm. October is the perfect time to ask yourself: do you want to hibernate or excel?

For this edition, we wanted to know how our innovators see the squirrel theme applying to them and what nuts they are hiding🐿️. 

We are looking forward to sharing their resilience strategies!

— Leonard Ulrich (Publisher)

Building for the Winter: Why Resilience Matters More Than Momentum

At 17, I've discovered that founding a startup is considerably easier to romanticise than to actually do. Particularly when you're simultaneously studying for A-Levels, raising investment and trying to convince people considerably older than you that you know what you're talking about.

I’ve gone through this process as the founder and CEO of Aspire, a financial technology startup helping young people make their goals real through better financial decisions, career planning and access to opportunities.

The idea came from something I kept noticing around me. Two equally ambitious young people could have completely different prospects, not because of their abilities, but because one understood money, had access to professional networks and knew how to navigate the decisions ahead of them, while the other didn't.

I initially established Aspire as a nonprofit, created to provide practical skills, mentoring and opportunities in schools. But I increasingly realised that workshops alone couldn't address the problem. Young people needed something they could use every day, making better decisions about their money and futures.

So, alongside my co-founder Oliver Phillips, we began building it.

Today, we're developing a digital financial platform, we’ve secured backing from experienced entrepreneurs and financial services executives, and are preparing for our public launch in November.

Which brings me to squirrels.

Their secret to surviving winter is preparation. While the weather is good and food is plentiful, they're busy accumulating what they'll need when conditions become less favourable.

There's a rather obvious parallel with startups.

Fundraising announcements, exciting introductions and encouraging user numbers are wonderful. They're also fleeting. The real test is whether you've built something that survives when those external sources of momentum disappear.

For Aspire, that means investing in three things: a product young people genuinely return to, trusted distribution through schools and universities, and a team capable of executing when the novelty wears off.

We've also learnt to distinguish between progress and the appearance of progress. A prestigious meeting is not an investment. An impressive pitch deck is not a functioning business. And raising money is ultimately only useful if it enables us to build something that people actually want.

Personally, resilience has meant becoming considerably more comfortable with uncertainty. I've had to learn to absorb rejection without allowing it to determine my confidence in the company, whilst remaining honest enough to recognise when criticism is justified.

Perhaps most importantly, I've learnt that resilience isn't synonymous with working constantly. Having a co-founder I trust, maintaining interests outside Aspire and occasionally remembering that I'm still a teenager have become increasingly important.

As we approach launch, I'm excited about what we've built. But I'm equally conscious that the next twelve months will probably involve more difficult decisions than the previous twelve.

We're trying to build a company that helps an entire generation prepare for its future.

It seems only appropriate that we learn to prepare for our own.

— Aryan Vedhara

📍University of Oxford

Some of the most exciting ideas at Oxford never make it beyond a conversation between friends, a college group chat, or a poster pinned to a noticeboard. OxPitch was created to change that.

We’re Samuel Fatoke-Osobukola and Roman Lorello, two students entering our second year at Oxford, at Regent’s Park College and Lady Margaret Hall respectively. Together, we founded OxPitch, a social media platform showcasing the startups, projects, fundraisers, events and creative ventures being pursued by students across Oxford.

The idea began over coffee during the summer. While catching up, we found ourselves discussing how many ambitious things Oxford students were working on, but how difficult it could be for those ideas to reach people outside their immediate circles. Samuel had already seen the potential of short-form content through his personal platform, @chatwsam, and we began wondering whether we could use that same medium to put the spotlight on other students.

That conversation became OxPitch.

We launched @theoxfordpitch on 22 August, built around a simple question: “What’s your OxPitch?” Roman is the face on the ground, approaching students, asking the questions and building relationships across Oxford’s entrepreneurial community. Behind the camera, Samuel handles the filming, editing and much of the creative direction that turns each conversation into the content you see on OxPitch. Together, we brainstorm who and what to feature, combining Roman’s outreach and connections with Samuel’s content creation experience.

We saw the potential almost immediately. Our second-ever OxPitch featured Oxbridge Stipendium, a programme helping Czech and Slovak students secure funding to study at Oxford and Cambridge. The video reached 94,000 views and generated more than 20 email enquiries about the programme. For us, that demonstrated exactly why we wanted OxPitch to exist: sometimes an idea doesn’t need reinventing; it simply needs the right people to hear about it.

Our ambition is to build OxPitch into a bridge between student innovators and the people who can help them grow through attention, collaboration, participation or even funding. If the model succeeds at Oxford, we hope to expand to Cambridge and eventually other universities, creating a wider platform for student innovation.

But expansion starts with getting the foundations right. Our non-negotiable this year is consistency. Viral videos are exciting, but a platform is built in the less glamorous moments: approaching another stranger, filming another pitch, editing another video and continuing when a post doesn’t perform as expected.

Perhaps that is where the squirrel analogy fits us best. Before thinking about how far OxPitch can go, we have to keep doing the small things that give it its roots. 

There are students with extraordinary ideas throughout Oxford. We just want to keep asking: “What’s your OxPitch?”

— Samuel Fatoke-Osobukola & Roman Lorello

📍Birkbeck, University of London

Tell us about your career, education, artistic journey and current work.

Over the past two years at university, my artistic journey has developed hugely, and it’s gotten to the point where it has reached something I feel comfortable calling my own and my own personal style. It all correlates around memories, and has developed from a more traditional to a digital style. That development into the more contemporary has been something I’ve sort of had to force myself to do. It’s not been easy because it doesn’t seem to be everyone's cup of tea, whereas painting seems to be more palatable to people. It’s been a fight to accept that it’s what I want to do, and then pushing myself to do it.

In terms of what I’m doing now, I’m a university student at Birkbeck, I do art history with curating. It’s been so useful to me, it’s where I’ve learned pretty much everything that I currently do. 

Your art has gone through quite a thematic transformation in the past year, what advice would you give for those looking to take a similar leap?

If there is some sort of style that you want to paint, draw, collage, fold into paper, whatever, go and do it- you don’t have to share it. You can figure out what you like and don’t like to create without an audience, you can be the only person who needs to know that it exists. The outcome of my work and where it is, and other people's work, is the outcome of the millions of failed attempts that have not been shared. It’s incredibly important to not feel that everything you create, or say, or do is a whole sum of your character, talent or personality.

How did you get into exhibition curation? Any tips for those looking to pursue a similar path?

So I got into exhibition curating when I was in university on my second curating module. I had a great teacher, Kirsten Cooke, and it was just really insightful. I learned that you can pretty much do whatever you want if you just convince someone to help you do it. That’s what my exhibition proposal template is there to help you with! 

I sat in the Hoxton hotel in London and thought ok, my teacher has taught me how to write one of these proposals, so I’m going to sit in this hotel lobby and try to write one for a show. This first show proposal, INDEFATIGABLE, I sent to twenty venues and one said yes. It made me realise how possible it is and how much you can get done on your own without waiting for anyone else to do it for you. 

How do you balance curation with creating your own art and social media presence?

Social media is not something that came naturally to me, it’s something I am still learning. I’ve come on leaps and bounds recently which I’m so proud of. It went from being a minuscule part of my life to becoming one of the main things I think I’ll be doing in my future. I do love it now too, it can be so fulfilling even with the negatives of the platforms and of the format of short form content. I just hope that my content can be useful to the people who are looking for them: artists, curators, people who want to be those things.

I balance it through developing freelance skills and it’s the little tiny habits you do every day, things that keep your day structured. Using those tips helps me keep a shape to my day, weeks and months. It takes discipline but anyone can do it.

I really like your focus on the impact of your art and exhibitions. Throughout your journey, what are you most proud of putting out into the world and why? 

I think my video where I spoke about getting into exhibitions as an artist and being able to do things yourself got an incredible reaction and I am so incredibly proud that that video exists. It contains so much useful information in literally 18 seconds, and I find myself trying to compete with that video when I release more now. 

If any of our readers are interested in working with you in various capacities, what’s the best way to get in contact?

The best way to contact me is through email which is [email protected]. 

- Alfie Poelsing

📍University of Westminster

In 2022 I graduated from Queen Mary University with an undergraduate degree in English. In my first year, covid hit. Like the rest of the world, my life moved online, and as I continued my studies, my motivation, interest and general excitement diminished. By graduation, I was majorly burnt out. I had no job and no idea what I wanted to pursue.

In January 2023, I attended a week-long creative workshop meant to support you in getting a specific job. I didn’t learn anything new, and I didn’t get the job, but I did end up in a WhatsApp group with the other attendees. Through that random WhatsApp group, I ended up hearing about a role working in a London art exhibition. I immediately sent off an email to the organisation, mentioning who I heard about the opportunity from, and attached my CV. After a brief zoom interview, I had gotten myself a job in the most unexpected way.

Over the next few years, I learnt more about museums and galleries, working front of house positions at different London institutions. One day, I was chatting with a colleague and trying to figure out what to do next. I had passion, I had skills, but I had no motivation. She talked about her masters degree at the University of Westminster and I decided to have a look. I felt stuck and needed some redirection.

By January 2026, and I was half way through my masters. I had loved my studies so far, but still felt stuck in place. I had all these ideas of things I wanted to do, but felt caught up in cycles of stress. I decided to try and do something about this and ended up starting anti-depressants and therapy for OCD.

Everything began to slot into place.

Since then, I have worked to challenge myself and the structures I had set up that were keeping me stuck. I started to force myself to do things outside of work, message people online with shared interests, and apply to every opportunity I came across. I made peace with my inner perfectionist and decided to start before I was ready.

That perspective shift earned me an incredible opportunity and led me to meeting eureqa!’s creators. 

Whilst scrolling on TikTok one day, I came across an opportunity to apply to have your fine art prints sold in a London gallery exhibition curated by Megan Scarborough from Art Pulse. At the time, I had decided to start painting again for the first time in ten years. I needed a cathartic exercise to deal with my anxieties and chose to pick up a paintbrush rather than my phone.

I applied and moved on, not thinking much of it. To my surprise, I received an email saying that I had been successful. 

After a few weeks of sorting everything out, a print of a painting I’d made one random afternoon was shown in a London gallery exhibition.

Reflecting on the past year, I have completely shifted my life and gained a profound sense of hope. Through examining my daily habits and making the effort to change my perspective, I have gained more experience in the past nine months than I had across the past five years. 

Gaining sustained and practiced motivation has been the key to transform my passion into applied confidence and success. It hasn’t been easy and I do not expect everything to be smooth sailing, but with my new ways of seeing things, I am confident in my ability to ride the wave.

- Rebecca Mary Shevlin

What a night🥂!

On September 11th, we had the absolute pleasure of hosting 40 founders and artists for our very first eureqa! event, organised in collaboration with Art Pulse at the iconic Coningsby Gallery in Bloomsbury.

Moving away from dull university rooms and lecture halls, we wanted to try something entirely new: hosting an intimate gathering surrounded by art. The gallery backdrop provided just the refreshing atmosphere we had hoped for and it was the exact detail guests kept congratulating us on throughout the night.

Seeing complete strangers connect, swap ideas and build genuine friendships in such an inviting setting was more than we could have ever dreamed of. It took a few days for the success of the night to truly sink in, but now we are more energised than ever.

We’re already looking forward to our next events and can’t wait to welcome more of you wonderful people into our growing community.

A massive thank you to Megan Scarborough, founder of Art Pulse, for her incredible partnership and support in making this evening so unforgettable!

🎨 Want to learn more about changing the art world for the better? Check out Art Pulse and join the movement!

We’re happy to be official partners with LSE Entrepreneurs Society, the best careers society at LSE! Through high-quality speaker events that are also open to students from all unis (think Will Ahmed of Whoop recently), they are an essential part of the London founder community. → More on our events board!

Can you imagine being featured in the next eureqa! edition? Use the sign-up form and tell us about your venture! 👉Register your interest here

Join the eureqa! WhatsApp community for more exciting news, announcements and events. 🎉