Biography

Having spent my childhood in Monmouth, Wales, I did my degree in physics at Pembroke College, Oxford. During my time there I also spent summers interning with L.E.K. Consulting and Smartspread and one particularly gruelling 'holiday' in America selling $24,000 of books door to door for the Southwestern Company.

I'd always had a lust to start a technology business though and so after graduation and with no technology to commercialise, I enrolled as a researcher at the Medical Vision Lab.

Vision is a fascinating if complex field and plunged me into one of the deepest and darkest ends of software development. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by some very clever peers during my time and to have had great supervisors in the form of Prof. Andrew Zisserman and Sir Mike Brady.

Outside the lab, I got more and more interested in ballroom and Latin American dancing and ended up treading the boards with the Oxford University Dancesport team. Almost all my free time was spent training and competing and I'm very proud to hold two Full Blues for Varsity matches during my time there.

I left research to found Webkitchen in April '04 and built an AJAX content management system that enabled small businesses to develop and grow their own websites.

The CMS was deployed at about the same time as Web 2.0 was starting to boom/bubble though and on spending time thinking about these new philosophies, it struck me that there was real potential in the emerging architectures that hadn't yet been realised.

Since developing the CMS I deployed Eventsites, and Sitefire and am currently working Clickpass, an application that makes OpenID and single-sign-on one-click consumer simple.