Shazz Bhunnoo. Founder and CEO of Spaces Property Group. Funded by Y Combinator (Winter 2009). Former investment banker at Deutsche Bank. First class graduate from the London School of Economics.

When I was studying at LSE, the typical career path of investment banking just didn’t appeal to me. I decided to set up the LSE Entrepreneurs student society to promote entrepreneurship at the student level. The society has since grown substantially and is now at the forefront of student entrepreneurship.

I graduated in 2005 and took up an Analyst position at Deutsche Bank. I did the usual grad bootcamp training, rotated through various placements in the bank and eventually settled in a front-office position on the credit side in Global Markets. Having worked in the city both before and during university, I already knew I would only stay put for a short while. After completing the bootcamp training, I headed to New York to spend a bit of time on Wall Street and I did a couple of all-expenses-paid business trips. The lifestyle was great, but I decided it was time to step out before I got too used to it. I resigned from banking in April 2006.

I’d managed to secure financing to buy my first property in 2005, during my last year at university. When I left banking I decided to buy more. Within a year my portfolio was comfortably valued in seven figures, while generating cash-on-cash returns excluding capital appreciation of around 20%.

Although Spaces Property Group effectively started in 2005, it was only in late 2007 that I introduced the name ‘Spaces’. This came about when I first developed what is now called Spaces Urban Living – fully inclusive rooms on and around London’s South Bank. The Urban Living portfolio grew gradually over about two years and it’s now the largest private landlord for fully inclusive room rentals in the area.

In 2008, I felt the need to create a separate proposition, tightly focussed on delivering market-beating asset returns to investors. Spaces Capital become our investor-facing brand. We work with private and institutional investors to improve performance of existing assets and to deploy capital into new acquisitions.

Spaces Short Stays started as a pilot scheme in 2011. It’s effectively a premium version of Urban Living, tailored for short term renting. We call the accommodation ‘hotel-style rooms’. The pilot model gained excellent traction and returned us two times our minimum performance target. Short Stays is now scaling up.

So far I’ve taken a few ideas and built them out into businesses that are generating some healthy returns. With a multi-million pound asset base and strong cashflow, I’m now expanding SPG and driving further growth.