I have never been able to not make things.
Software, businesses, teams, music. The material changes; the instinct does not.
I wrote my first line of code in 1986 and went online in 1994, and I have been experimenting ever since. What I do has a shape to it: find the business problem, design the software that answers it, build or direct the team that ships it — and then sell it, or use it to change how an organisation works.
I am drawn to very large problems that turn out to have elegantly simple answers. That has taken me through founding software businesses, enterprise sales, investing in startups, buying and growing development capacity, advising senior executives, and running technology programmes inside some of the largest companies in the world. The work page has the detail.
What I believe about software
Every user deserves an exceptional experience — including the ones who did not choose the software and cannot leave. Enterprise tools get a pass on this that they have not earned. Software people enjoy using gets adopted, and software that gets adopted produces the data that makes everything downstream possible. The design argument and the commercial argument are the same argument.
I also believe the order matters more than the destination. Data, then information, then knowledge, then AI. Skip a step and you get a demonstration; take them in order and you get an advantage. I drew that in 2016 and have been making the case ever since.
How I build teams
The BBH founders had a rule I have kept: hire people who are good and nice. Genuinely capable at the work, and considerate towards the people around them. People who care about their colleagues make a team behave like one unit rather than a group of individuals, and that shows up in what gets delivered.
I do not set coding tests. I would rather have a conversation about work someone has actually done and listen to how they reason about it — what they would change, where they think the limits were, what they did when the constraints got tight. That tells me far more about judgement than a puzzle does, and judgement is the thing that is hard to teach.
Twenty-five years of building distributed teams across Europe, the Americas and Asia leaves you with a network — engineers, product leaders, designers and technologists I know are both good and nice, because I have watched them work. When a business needs a capability quickly, that network is usually the shortest route to it.
Outside the work
I compose and produce music. I have played and followed basketball most of my life, which is where I formed the view that a team of good people beats a team of good players. And I ski with my family whenever the calendar allows it.
Details
BSc Computing Science, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).
Based in London, United Kingdom.
I also started a PhD at UMIST — Integration of XML Specifications for E-commerce Applications — and walked away from it just as I was about to write it up. The idea was to let you search for a product once and find it across every e-commerce site, which is roughly what Google launched as Froogle in 2002 and now runs as Google Shopping. Why I quit is a better story in person than in writing, so ask me.