About
I am a tech founder, equally as passionate about business stragegy, digital product creation, information design and code. For the many years I have been addicted to exploring data portability and user experience. When possible, I speek at web events.
I currently sit on or advise tech company boards driving growth and innovation by empowering the people I work with.
Career History
StudentCrowd is a decision-making platform for higher education students. It provides in-depth information on universities, courses and accommodation and produces its own league tables based on genuine reviews from verified students. I took over as Chair post Series A investment led by Mercia to help the management team scale the business.
Firefly is a leading SaaS learning platform for schools, making it simple for students, teachers and parents to create, share and learn. It’s a cloud-based service used in 500 schools across 30 countries. While at Firefly, I have helped the team focus on growth, raising £10m in scale-up funding. During this period Firefly also made two successful EdTech acquisitions, as the product continues to develop. My role on the board is to provide insight into product and commercial decision making and to be an independent voice. In February 2023, Firefly was acquired by US Edtech leaders Veracross.
After the acquisition of Madgex by Wiley I managed innovation and product development within the company. As part of the management team, I oversaw the integration of Madgex into Wiley. I refocused its product development at Wiley’s Academic Research audience. During this period, we increased the revenue by 80% in 18 months.
Madgex is a world-leading supplier of job board platforms. I founded the company with two former colleagues, and we took it from a start-up to a well-respected multi-million-pound technology company, with offices in Brighton, New York and Toronto. Its clients included Gumtree, The Guardian, Washington Post, BMJ and many of the largest publishers. It currently manages over 200 job board brands for clients. We sold the business to Wiley in 2020
TAtech is the industry trade association for talent acquisition solutions. I gave insight on industry trends to the board and talks at the American and European conferences.
I was asked by Mozilla to take one of my open-source libraries and turn it into a component for Firefox. This included updates of the test suite and all tooling required for automated testing. This was an unsalaried project for a non-profit.
Work as a external technical consultant helping research and develop an identity aggregation system for the authors of social media contents.
I directed the information design and the technical architecture of the company’s intranet. A major part of the project was constructing an environment that encouraged large scale independent contribution. My final focus at Virgin was creating an intranet contact and authentication service for the whole enterprise.
CCS was a Communication Group specialising in the pharmaceutical sector. I designed and built medical research and marketing information systems. I worked at all levels with clients such as Pfizer, Bayer and Glaxo Wellcome, including providing intranet architecture consultancy at board level.