Stephan Shakespeare

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Stephan Shakespeare (born 1957 in Germany as Stephan Kukowski) is the founder and Chief Innovations Officer of the high-profile British Internet-based market research and opinion polls company YouGov. His other business interests include Internet television channel 18 Doughty Street.

Kukowski (as he then was) came to the UK at the age of five and was educated at Christ's Hospital near London. After graduating from Oxford, he became a teacher and was a headmaster in Los Angeles, California, in the 1980s.

When he married, he exchanged his Polish 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.

[edit] YouGov

In 2000, Shakespeare founded the YouGov web site with Nadhim Zahawi. One of YouGov’s claims to fame is that it called 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 is currently (as of August 2007) acquiring the German market research organisation Psychonomics. Shakespeare currently owns around 20 per cent of YouGov.