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My story.
My first brush with technology came as a 7-year-old boy dismantling toys to build a robot to carry a cup of tea to my dad. It mostly worked, with only about 20% spillage. A few years later, I was “coding” (copying text from a computer magazine) to play games with friends on a Commodore 64. A keen interest in robotics and software was blossoming. This ultimately led me to graduate with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I regret being dissuaded from studying robotics and AI, although writing an app to design wind turbine blades was fun.
Graduating during the dotcom boom, my first real job was in IT, building strategies and techniques to roll out thousands of computers around the world. This came from being employed by a global telecoms firm just as the Internet took off. Trips to offices in Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney left me with fond memories. Around this time, I blew off steam with some easy-going DJ gigs, spinning deep house on the 1210s.
Moving to banking in London’s City district took me to a Japanese bank, where I learned how hierarchy and an abundance of caution can slow progress to a snail’s pace. Looking for something more upbeat, I shifted to electronic broking, where high speed was the underlying principle behind many decisions. By then, I was running a global engineering team and hogging the office ADSL for BitTorrent downloads (Sickbeard, I owe you!).
A couple of acquisitions and promotions later, I was shipping a $5 million platform for the world’s largest interdealer broker, where for the first time UX was in the driving seat. Excellent UX is now, rightly, baked into every builder’s psyche. This platform ended up being quite successful.
Then blockchain came into my life. What started as an interest became an obsession. Having worked with many expensive, centralised, mission-critical backend systems, blockchains felt like a perfectly logical evolutionary step forward. The deeper I got into the business, the more I realised blockchains are not only logical, they’re crucial for globally connected businesses to remain profitable. Swallowing the BTC pill in 2016 (wish I’d swallowed more) sealed the deal, and I knew my future would be at the cutting edge of web3. Some boxes ticked so far: build an enterprise-grade blockchain, form a DAO, launch a web3 startup, do something totally new (I’m helping UK lawmakers navigate digital assets), successfully overwinter at least 2 honey bee colonies (that's not a web3 thing). This list will keep growing.
Feel free to follow along, join the conversation, or just lurk silently and pretend you know what I’m talking about. Either way, glad you’re here.
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