Nick Hungerford, a tech entrepreneur with bone cancer that is terminal, says that his two-year-old daughter inspired him to start a charity for children who have lost a parent.
Nick Hungerford, 43, has two months left to live, and he believes that children shouldn’t have to deal with grief and trauma for a lifetime.
Elizabeth’s Smile is the name of his charitable organization.
“Wants to be a doctor so she can help people like Daddy,” he said, describing Elizabeth as “very, very brave.”
She takes such good care of me. She purchased a stethoscope and checks me each opportunity I return from the emergency clinic,” Nick Hungerford told the BBC’s Today program.
In 2011, Nick Hungerford was a co-founder of the investment platform Nutmeg. Funders famously turned down the idea 45 times in a row. In 2021, JP Morgan bought the company for a reported £700 million.
‘Reflect on life’
A rare type of bone cancer known as Ewing sarcoma affects Nick Hungerford. When he felt pain in his right thigh in 2019, he was first told he had cancer. He had surgery to remove his femur, but the cancer came back at the end of 2021. This week he uncovered in The Message that he had a few months left to live.
“I’ve had the chance to ponder life in a manner that such countless individuals don’t get to do,” he told the BBC, since he knew about his demise “for quite a while” since his malignant growth repeated.
He stated that there was a “real lack of understanding” of how losing a parent affects children.
“I would rather not contrast it with business issues, yet it resembled seeing an enormous hole on the lookout,” he said, adding that he found it unsuitable that his girl and different youngsters ought to need to live with the close to home effect of dispossessed guardians.
So the main thing Elizabeth’s Grin is zeroing in on is developing that information with analysts and clinicians all over the planet.
He said that the research would help make products for the Smile Network, the charity’s second part. The Smile Network already has a series of books that teach people who work with bereaved children how to deal with losing a parent.
It will likewise assist with interfacing deprived youngsters to an organization that has been set up by a parent, so that when the parent bites the dust, the kid can keep on getting counsel and direction around things like which college to go to, or where to work.
“In the event that I’m nowhere to be found, I can’t make that presentation,” Mr Hungerford said. ” It’s to ensure not a solitary kid is distraught in view of the passing of a parent.”
In order for his daughter to be able to log on and “talk” to him, he has also set up an artificial intelligence website with videos of himself answering hundreds of personal questions.
“She will have pictures, stories and admittance to my organization of companions, so she will actually want to develop a full image of me,” he said.
Nick Hungerford knows a few things about dealing with rejection.
In 2010, the 34-year-old Englishman was going to meeting after meeting in California’s Silicon Valley, trying to secure funding for his business idea – Nutmeg, an online-based investment management business.
And the first 45 wealthy investors he pitched to all said no.
“It was horrible,” he says. “The feedback was very personal.
“Some investors said they liked the idea, but that I couldn’t do it. Others said they didn’t like the idea, and some simply said I wasn’t good enough.
“It was really brutal, I hugely questioned myself.”
At the time Mr Hungerford, who was in Silicon Valley after completing a Master of Business Administration from nearby Stanford University, was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, and working out of his garage.
“I was living the entrepreneurial dream that had turned into a horrific reality,” he says.
It was the autumn of 2010 at this point, and Mr Hungerford was running out of money, maxing out his credit cards to cover his living expenses.
He says: “I drew a line in the sand, and said that if I haven’t got a ‘yes’ by December I would go and get a job.”
