Stephan Shakespeare

Stephan Shakespeare (born 9 April 1957, Germany as Stephan Kukowski) is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the high-profile British Internet-based market research and opinion polls company YouGov [1]. He also owns the websites ConservativeHome [2] and the non-partisan PoliticsHome [3], which he launched in April 2008 after closing down his Internet television channel 18 Doughty Street.

Stephan was born 1957 in Mönchengladbach where his German father, a journalist, was German Press Liaison Officer of Headquarters British Army of the Rhine. When he was five years old the family moved to the UK where he was educated at Christ's Hospital near Horsham, West Sussex. After graduating from Oxford he took a one-year teaching course in Kingston upon Thames, during which time he was a member of the Socialist Workers Student Society. He became a teacher and was a headmaster in Los Angeles, California in the 1980s. After he married Rosamund Shakespeare 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 Campaign Director 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. During the campaign Margaret Thatcher, against whom he had demonstrated as a student 17 years earlier, came to Colchester to support his attempt to win the seat for the Conservatives, but he came a close second to the Liberal Democrat Bob Russell.

YouGov

In 2000, Shakespeare founded YouGov 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 Middle East (acquiring the Dubai based qualitative agency Siraj) & 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. The company further expanded in 2010 and 2011, acquiring US-based Harrison Group in Waterbury, Connecticut and Definitive Insights in Portland Oregon. In 2011 the company established itself in Paris, France.

After a spell as joint CEO with co-founder Zahawi, Shakespeare took the title Chief Innovations Officer until he became sole CEO in May 2010 when Zahawi resigned from the board to stand for election to the House of Commons.

Owning about 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".[4]

External links

• YouGov homepage
• ConservativeHome homepage
• PoliticsHome homepage