Jay Bregman : Full Biography : SPEAKERS for BUSINESS

Jay Bregman

Mind candy for fast-growth businesses

Full Biography

“It’s true that you can boil a good business down to one simple idea, but what’s much more important is execution!”

Jay was recently listed by The Times as one of the 100 people to watch in 2012. Jay is Founder and CEO of Hailo, an app which makes people's lives easier and may prevent London's iconic Hackney carriage taxis from being driven off the road by the rise of the minicab. Jay's vision allows black cabs in London (and soon in Dublin too) to be booked via smartphone and lets cabbies know where passengers are waiting and where the road works are.

Jay is also the Founder & CTO of eCourier.co.uk, the online courier company with the purple vans. The idea for his business came from a personal frustration with same day couriers. So he decided to do something and act on his frustration. The result is a £6m business built in four years, recently ranked 53rd on the Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 and sixth on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 rankings of the fastest-growing and most innovative technology companies in the country. In 2007, eCourier was chosen as London’s Most Inspirational Business by the Evening Standard.

The innovation at the heart of eCourier is a real-time optimisation algorithm called 'Larry' which assigns orders to eCouriers and building routes in real time. This solves the problem of human dispatchers issuing work to couriers via radio which is the most common cause of low efficiency, high overheads, and diseconomies of scale. The end result is a neat balance of client happiness, courier happiness, and fleet efficiency.

In spite of being from New York City, Jay was named an ‘Enterprising Young Brit’ by Make Your Mark and is very happy working and living in London. His skills and energies are much in demand and he was recruited as a member of the Office of Fair Trading’s Futures Advisory Board, advising the regulator on new trends in the relationship between markets and government.

Using the stories of eCourier and Hailo Jay speaks informatively on technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, building a brand and the challenges of running a high growth company through a recession.