I’m 31. I’ve made a lot of money and, rather crucially, I’ve lost a lot of money too — or, if you’re after a different perspective: I’ve invested in a substantial amount of direct experience. Much, much better than an MBA in my opinion and I avoided the long essays too.

At 24, I got my childhood dream sorted: My secret aim was to own a company and sit behind a big desk in the middle of a big office working with some of the best and the brightest. Phenomenal! I’ve now set rather more substantial aims.

Three times I’ve sat at a board table and had someone ask to buy my company. Once was a complete surprise. The other two, I had a handle on the situation, but each time was thoroughly exciting.

The last deal I participated in was a $26m tech acquisition (good news for all involved).

I’ve worked at almost every level of the interactive business — running companies out of my bedrooms and running them from gorgeous, opulent board rooms. I’m fascinated by how we interact via technology and how that translates to commercial advantage. This fascination has prompted me to launch a plethora of websites, communities, services and organisations — most have generally been successful.

I’ve experience raising funding — my colleague Serena and I raised $1m from an American venture firm in 1999. While she led and supervised the process, I learned a lot. Here’s a report from The Guardian about that.

I have an obsessive need to eventually view business concepts and ideas in cold, hard reality. While I’m pretty good at blue-sky thinking, I relish the challenge of rooting them with a sensible and profitable business model. I can generally spot a good business idea at 50 paces. In this context, I never fail to be excited at hearing about (and creating) new startup companies.

I’m a programmer. I’ve written countless scalable and proven systems for own companies, mostly using PHP, MySQL, Apache and an array of Linux flavours. I like being able to *actually* create. I can rustle up a prototype quicker than you can say ‘how would that work?’. I sketched out the basic concept for Eventscope, my online networking services company, on a receipt at Pizza Express. Six months later we’d sold the first client — a little while later and the world’s largest conference company, Informa, use it for almost every single one of their events. I wrote versions 1 and 2 myself — and we’ve now got a super team of developers running 3.0+.

I wrote Neo One Impulse, my text to screen service for nightclubs in a caffeine fueled haze and I got a huge, huge kick out of seeing the service live across countless nightclubs (Luminar Leisure have 300+ venues). This was back when text messaging was relatively new in the United Kingdom. We were doing something like 100,000 messages a night in some cases. At one point I calculated we accounted for point-zero something percent of the entire UK traffic some nights.

One of my biggest accomplishments was creating ‘Live Event Chat‘ — a stadium chat system capable of handling hundreds of thousands of users in a live guest chat facility. I still haven’t come up with a decent name for it. One of the biggest challenges running online communities is running celebrity or special-guest group chats. Most interactive software, despite the protestations and guarantees of their designers, simply cannot cope when, say, 5,000 people try and join within the space of 10 seconds. I thought long and hard about the challenges — it needs to LOOK good, be accessible to ANYONE and handle crazy amounts of traffic. Even if you build a system to work for 10,000 concurrent users, you’ll struggle if one of the triple-A bloggers or sites happens to mention the event and provide a link. A constant panic, especially when you’re being paid by large media companies to make it work. I rescued BSkyB’s Sky One a while ago. The rubbish software they’d deployed for their hugely popular Paul McKenna ‘I Can Make You Thin’ series resulted in phenomenal online-chat traffic. Their first chat event was a damp squid as a result. My company stepped in and solved it. We’ve provided service for ITV, an array of UK Governments and — my favourite — Harry Potter author, JK Rowling. Half a million questions submitted across 7 days with 250,000 submitted in one hour. I’m pleased to report that the system didn’t break a sweat.

Rapid Prototyping is something I thoroughly enjoy. I’ve been doing a lot of that recently for C-level executives in some large banks. I really like being able to sit in front of a person, listen to their technical challenges (”I’d like to see just how many Priority One failures we’re experiencing every day — and, could I get a text update with each?”) and return a few days later with a working prototype. It really does blow minds. I then evolve the prototype over a few more instances, harden it, document it and hand it over to their IT teams to support. Executive level management in Financial Institutions. I am continually surprised by how many semi-critical or critical business systems in large banks are held together with sticky tape.

I’ll take a step back into the past for a few paragraphs…

Online Communities Are My Bag. I started back with Delphi Internet in 1994 or 1995, if memory serves. I was fascinated by how people interacted via technology online. I’ve setup and grown countless online communities for myself and on behalf of other companies. My first professional role was with AOL UK. I setup and managed their teens area — I called it The OuterEdge and christened the main chatroom The Groove. The last time I checked, the chatroom was still there. I turned the area into the most popular section on the service within 3 months, before leaving to create the teen and student area for the newly formed Virgin Net. Then I wanted to see if I could do it all myself — so I took out my credit card and, with colleague Alistair, setup The Junction in 1996. It fast became Europe’s leading teen community (with a little help from Yahoo — they sent us 1,000 new users a day at one point after they included our listing). I finished there, handing the reigns over to Alistair, before beginning an even more ambitious project: Raise $1 million to startup a community services firm. I hatched the plan with co-founder Serena Doshi and we went live in June 1999.

Liv4now.com was the name of the company. The concept being that we establish a leading entertainment community in the UK to demonstrate our ability to grow and manage communities — and then provide chatrooms, discussion forums and strategy consultancy to other companies looking for help. Conveniently, the dotcom bubble was growing rapidly and there were countless brands needing our assistance. We received $1m investment (super work, Serena) and got to work in September 1999. We hired a crack team and we dominated the marketplace for community services in the UK and Europe.

The end of the dotcom ‘bubble’ caused a bit of consternation: Nearly all of our clients went out of business within the space of 2-3 weeks. I took over as CEO just at this point, introduced our Neo One brand name and set about changing our business focus immediately. Instead of community, we focused on moderation. We won a string of high profile UK media clients including Teletext, Flextech TV, Yoomedia/BSkyB and led the market — at one point we had over 100 moderators working away, reviewing content prior to publication on discussion boards, chatrooms and text services.

Which brings me back to Neo One Impulse — SMS text to screen in nightclubs. I had a super time installing our systems into countless UK nightclubs and thoroughly enjoyed watching hordes of clubbers texting our systems. The traffic was absolutely phenomenal. That was my first direct exposure into the consumer front-end of mobile. When we were the first on the planet to enable clubbers to send picture messages (MMS) to screen, I searched high and low for a publication that would cover this triumph. (And it really was a triumph — back then, the MMS systems at most operators were held together with sticky-tape). No journalist and no media outlet was willing to write about us. This was a hugely annoying experience. Because we were not a big brand, we were completely ignored by the mainstream media.

So I set about fixing this. I first launched SMS Text News to cover the mobile and text messaging marketplace back in January 2006. It fast became one of the most influential blog communities covering the mobile industry. I renamed it to Mobile Industry Review (MIR) in September 2008 after our monthly traffic surpassed 250,000 industry executives and fanatics. MIR became subscription-only in March 2008 (you can see read and search the back-archive).

I launched Mobile Developer TV in late April 2008, focusing closely on the burgeoning mobile applications development industry.

… And that’s me. Drop me a note if you fancy a chat.