- Stephan Shakespeare
Stephan Shakespeare (born in
Germany as Stephan Kukowski) is the founder andChief Innovations Officer of the high-profile British Internet-based market research andopinion polls companyYouGov . His other business interests included the now defunctInternet television channel18 Doughty Street . In April 2008 he launched the web site Politics Home [http://www.politicshome.com] .Stephan was born 1957 in
Monchengladbach , where his German father, a journalist, was German Press Liaison Officer of HeadquartersBritish Army of the Rhine . When he was five years old, the family moved to the UK, where he was educated atChrist's Hospital nearHorsham , West Sussex. After graduating from Oxford, he became a teacher and was a headmaster inLos Angeles ,California , in the 1980s. When he married, he exchanged his surname for his wife’s.After returning home to the UK from the US, he became involved in politics, first as a political commentator and then as
Jeffrey Archer ’s spokesman during and after his failed London mayoral campaign. He was also a Conservative Party pollster.In the 1997 general election, Shakespeare was the Conservative candidate for Colchester, but came a close second to the Liberal Democrat Bob Russell.
YouGov
In 2000, Shakespeare founded the YouGov web site with Nadhim Zahawi. YouGov’s first claim to fame was that it predicted Labour’s ten-point general election victory in 2001 within one percentage point. After expanding its business to the United States by a major investment in the California-based opinion polling company Polimetrix in 2006, YouGov acquired a German and a Scandinavian market research organisation in 2007. Owning just over 11 per cent of Yougov, Shakespeare is the company's biggest shareholder. In July 2008 "
The Guardian " listed him among the top 100 media personalities of the UK, calling him "the pollster with the uncanny ability of getting it right". [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/14/mediatop100200878]References
External links
* [http://18doughtystreet.com/ "18 Doughty Street"] homepage
* [http://yougov.com/ "YouGov"] homepage
* [http://www.politicshome.com/ "Politics Home"] homepage
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