James Minter talks about going from Head Honcho of Adam St to a Headhunter

Sam Sethi talks with James Minter about the story of his club, Adam Street in London which not been told.

James is as self-effacing as he is charming, recounting with warmth the role it played in the dotcom boom.

“Adam Street was absolutely amazing,” he recalls. “It was a first, unique, and I met the most wonderful bunch of people there. No one has ever directly copied it.”

Now sadly defunct, the venue off The Strand – with its bar, restaurant, library, gallery, and event space – became the go-to place for London’s tech entrepreneurs as they rallied after the bubble burst.

Originally established as serviced offices by James after a career in the navy, Adam Street became a magnet for dotcom start-ups with few assets and little capital. The club itself opened in 2001 in an old watering hole for actors propping up the building.

What would become the first entrepreneurs’ club in London was seeded when James noted the then itinerant nature of Julie Meyer’s First Tuesday networking club.

“Back in those days it was still the case that if you went into a club you weren’t allowed to talk about business – it was not done and was meant to be a subtle under-the-radar thing,” he explains. “So I thought you have got all these people together, First Tuesday moving from venue to venue, why isn’t there a fixed place where entrepreneurs hang out?”

These were the heady days of a gold rush.

Nonetheless, like all roller-coaster rides, the dotcom era was marked as much by the founding as by the spectacular failure of new internet-based companies, with the Lastminute.com IPO in 2000 signalling the bursting of the bubble.

“By the time we opened the club in 2001 it wasn’t such an auspicious time. It wasn’t really until 2003 that we got up to about 1,000 members, but by then a number of characters had helped gather together the bomb-burst and we had a whole layer of true entrepreneurs who came back together after the dotcom highs and lows to rebuild the tech community.”

These included such characters as Michael Acton Smith, creator of Moshi Monsters; Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, who introduced James to the term “podcast”; and Richard Duvall, the man behind the first internet bank, Egg, and co-founder of peer-to-peer pioneer Zopa.

The key to the club’s success was ambience shaped by an enthusiastic staff helping to select the right members in a niche that morphed from a shared workspace during the day into a nightclub for hothousing ideas at night.

“There was no music during the day, but at about 5.30 we put on a little bit – and by 10.30 people were dancing on the tables. I also like to think that we introduced the espresso martini into the London cocktail scene!”

Adam Street’s glory days lasted until 2008, but faded amid the global financial meltdown and the migration of tech entrepreneurs to Silicon Roundabout in East London. At that time James also had music on the mind, reopening Notting Hill’s famous Tabernacle.

Although it played host to battalions of iconic digital pioneers, James believes Adam Street was not just about tech – but primarily about entrepreneurship and making connections, a skill he has taken to the digital leadership experts Hannington Tame.