Short resume
What did someone once call me? A “digital nomad” – something like that. I’m a cofounder of FitFu.com.
As a child I dreamed of being a Ghostbuster. On that front I’ve been disappointed… but my life so far has featured considerably more robots, lasers, nuclear reactors, spacecraft, software and racing cars than expected.
Long resume
My path to being a startuppy typehas been a tortuous one… 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 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 countless times.
Nuclear Robots
My first job after school was designing robots to go into nuclear reactors to 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 spaceships…
Russian Spacecraft
… which was very pretty much 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 engineer. But anyway, it was all good and I managed to get to Japan eventually.
Racing Cars
Not exactly sure how, 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. Apart from the late nights, gasoline fumes, crappy (and very expensive!) burgers and repeated sun burn it was a truly awesome experience.
I also spent some time in Cape Town setting up an unsuccessful cottage-industry manufacturing outfit. That’s a really long story…
Big Industry
Eventually I got a proper job. I discovered proper jobs aren’t for me. However:
- It paid back my debts from the Cape Town experiment
- 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
That’s where I am now…
