About

I haven’t had a career; I’ve had what Dirk Gently might characterise as a series of highly connected but seemingly random events.

I studied Engineering Economics and Management at Oxford, worked at Ofcom and around innovation policy, then Economics at Cambridge, and started a PhD at Imperial College Business School looking at entrepreneurship, economic growth and public policy.

Then I dropped out to co-found 10to8.

We nearly killed 10to8, rebuilt it, and grew it into an international software business. I later ran the company as CEO and Chair; we won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade, and eventually sold it in 2023. I came out of the experience with an unreasonable number of ideas about what makes companies successful, and what makes entrepreneurs themselves succeed as people.

Somewhere along the way, I also started bothering other founders.

These days, through Cleevely & Partners and directly, I work with founders and technology companies on the awkward bits of company-building: strategy, scaling, boards, financing, acquisitions, exits, and the occasional abrupt collision between a company and reality.

I also invest in technology companies, although I try not to advertise that too loudly, so please don’t be too disappointed if I don’t respond to cold outreach.

At the moment I sit on a few boards, including AI VIVO, CriticalZero, and Privu. I’m a member of Cambridge Angels, and a Fellow & Catalyst of the Cambridge Female Founders Network.

Back where I started

I never entirely stopped thinking about the questions that interested me before I became a founder.

Before 10to8 I worked on innovation and regulation at Ofcom, contributed to work around the UK government’s first Annual Innovation Review, wrote an Economics Master’s thesis on long-run economic growth, information-sharing networks and industrial revolutions, and researched entrepreneurship systems at Imperial.

Since then I’ve periodically wandered back into that world: co-authoring work on COVID-19 testing (Oxford Review of Economic Policy), writing about innovation and economic regulation, and more recently about AI, discovery, knowledge and public institutions.

Most of what I’m trying to understand comes back to some version of the same question: why do some technologies and companies make it into the world while others don’t, and what do the systems around them - people, capital, regulation, knowledge and institutions - have to do with it?

Some of that thinking turns into Notes. Some of it turned into The Founder’s Map, which is essentially several hundred pages of me trying to help founders make exciting and new mistakes rather than boring and avoidable ones.

Mostly, though, I’m still learning.

Outside work, I’m slowly learning Polish and forgetting how to play the cello alarmingly quickly.