Technology and consultancy

Advisory board member with focus on technology innovation.

Founded a telecommunications software vendor on nothing much more than an idea and an overdraft. Recruited an awesome team who built a rock solid product and successful reseller channel to deliver it to thousands of business users. Grew the company organically and profitably year on year before managing a smooth exit by acquisition to Aerial Group in early 2019.

After Redbourne changed direction, paid my mortgage by doing sub contracted network design for several high profile public sector projects.Also did freelance high availability web service architecture design for several high grossing e-commerce sites.Worked with a US based web load balancing vendor when I spotted an opportunity as a distributor to very successfully introduce their products into Europe. Made highly profitable consultative sales of their startup product with own wraparound local services into many large scale blue chip deployments. This is the role where I made the leap from technologist to entrepreneur as I learned by trial and error how to create product/market fit and bootstrap sales pipelines.

Dotcom era dalliance with building web infrastructure for scale.Wrong side of the Atlantic and ahead of its time. With hindsight ended exactly how you would expect with the added intrigue of a pivot that landed me briefly in a Financial Services Company.Acquired by Mazars.

Security software and consulting business.Acquired by Redbourne.

Lead teams and did tech strategy for switching, routing hardware and network management software. May have been a tiny little bit responsible for how L2 VLANs turned out.Programme managed NMS platform products across the company. This was constantly a very high profile engineering project in the company which involved coordinating the work of around a dozen teams split between US East and West Coast, UK, Ireland, Israel and suppliers in the far East into a single product which was shipped on physical media. All on a fixed "do or die" release cycle coinciding with quarterly results announcements. Did the job for several release cycles, loved the challenge (and the travel), but left it when having a young family forced me to re-evaluate my lifestyle with respect to the extended travel pre-zoom.

Best job I ever had really. Spent first few years of my grown up life surrounded by the brightest technical folks of my generation. Lead a team that wrote a TCP/IP software stack for a novel parallel microprocessor architecture and managed system software development in an era when Linux hadn't been invented yet. Still believe the world would be better if microkernels had won.Became a passionate Internet fanatic and Open Source software proponent in this role, something that has never left me.