Short resume
I’m a self-professed internet boffin, non-designer and serial entrepreneur internet adventurer based in London. My main company is BrainBakery.com GymFu.com.
My life has turned out to have fewer ghosts and ectoplasm than I’d expected as a child, but considerably more robots, lasers, nuclear reactors, spacecraft, software and racing cars.
Long resume
My path to being a web geek has been a tortuous one, and some people (weird people, with nothing better to do, like you! 
) might find it interesting… So here’s a bit more about what I’ve done.
Upbringing
I’m an only child, born into a humble rural family – my mum has been a farm worker most of her life and my dad works the land. Like all good country boys I spent most of my formative years playing in fields, fishing, hunting, drawing, painting, climbing trees, making crude particle accelerators and developing ghost detectors. I can’t fault my upbringing, but I do wish my family had more scientific knowledge if only to have saved my from irradiating, electrocuting and poisoning myself during countless failed experiments.
Having a natural inclination for all things learned, I was the first of our family to go through college and the first to go to university. I think I was also the first out of my immediate family to go abroad – to Russia as it happens.
Nuclear Robots
My first job after school was designing robots to go into nuclear reactors and either inspect them or repair them. The less you know about this the better, but for a teenage geek, I think the only job in the world better than this would have been designing anti-matter powered star-fighters…
Russian Spacecraft
… which was very nearly my next job!
For a few weeks I managed to end up in Russia designing re-entry vehicles made of wood. This was the most hard-core job you could every imagine – modeling complex (so complex there was no book yet written about it!) thermodynamic equations in Fortran 77 on Russian-language MSDOS.
The institute I went to, MAI, looked a bit like this.
The weird thing is, I was meant to go to Japan and study robots. That made way more sense than what eventually happened since 1) I understood japanese 2) I didn’t know any russian 3) I was a robotics geek. But anyway, it was all good and I managed to get to Japan eventually.
Racing Cars
Not exactly sure why, but after the glitz and glamor of spacecraft I ended up designing racing cars and working freelance as a race engineer.
My main gig was working with a London-based privateer in the Monoposto championship. At the time it seemed like a lot of fun, but looking back on it it was a lot of late nights, gasoline fumes, crappy (and very expensive!) burgers and repeated sun burn so I’m not exactly sure what I saw in it. I suppose it was the teamwork and competition.
I also spent some time in Cape Town setting up an unsuccessful cottage-industry manufacturing outfit. I guess you could say that was my first startup, and it wasn’t very successful!
Big Industry
This is not so interesting. All you need to know is that:
- It paid back my debts from the Cape Town thing
- I traveled to pretty much every country in Europe
- I got promoted fast
- I invented (and filed patents for) a bunch of decent fuel-injection technologies
- I got bored and decided that the whole web thing was really for me
Internet
Despite being a C programmer during my teens, I managed to miss the whole Web1 boom and bust thing and end up in engineering instead. I felt like I had to put this right, so in 2007 I quit my job and started web applications company BrainBakery.
BrainBakery’s business model is a little unusual. We figured out pretty early that we didn’t have time to run a consultancy AND a startup, so we made the decision to build a consultancy that partly works for corporates and partly works for startups. By investing in (and, in the case of i-together, have directorships in) some of these companies we can still get our startup fix.
And that’s where I am now.
