As well as my position with Tech Nation on the Visa team, I'm currently investigating a variety of roles, all with a technological/startup flavour and I'm hoping to join a few exciting companies as an advisor soon! I also occasionally advise on how large organisations can innovate, what might work best for them. I have previously worked with Lloyds Banking Group, Hasbro, Aviva, Unilever, Soho House & Yahoo and Reckitt Benckiser.

Current Positions:

Founder Touchpaper.org | Tech Nation Tier 1 Visa Scheme Advisory Partner

Previous Position:

Co-Founder/Director at 3beards/Unicorn Hunt (acquired 2017)

COO The Bot Platform | Member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation

I excelled at school (academically at least), then dropped out of college. I started work in the finance department of an oil company (Tramp Group Ltd) where I trained to be an accountant. I qualified in 2002 and moved on when the company was acquired. After that I had a couple of jobs as Financial Controller, for a motor racing group and then at Touch Clarity, which was my first experience of a tech startup. This was where my startup life began. I'd always been the entrepreneurial, self starting type, but working with a great bunch of innovative tech types really inspired me. We were acquired in 2007 by Omniture (now owned by Adobe) and I left to go to another startup. However, this one was so badly run/structured, I quit after only 4 weeks and went back into oil as a CFO.

The CFO role was great, we rapidly expanded the company (up to $2.5bn turnover) but after a few years the politics of being part of a listed company started to get to me and that entrepreneurial itch really needed to be scratched. I left in 2012 and struck out into the wilds of East London to see how the tech scene had changed since my first foray in 2006/7.

I went to a huge variety of meetups, including London Business Angels, London New Finance and of course, Silicon Drinkabout. I got to know Ben, Bryce and Mike (the organisers of Silicon Drinkabout) over the coming months and the rest is history! At the same time I also met and started to work with Martha on ToBeSeen.

I spent nearly 3 years working day to day at 3beards, before handing the reins over to the team we had put together. You can read more about that here and the end of 3beards here. We sold the last part of the company, our tech job board Unicorn Hunt in 2017 to Tiny, the owners of Dribbble, MetaLab and Crew amongst others.

Over the summer of 2015 I spent a short time as Head of Entrepreneur Relations at Tech City UK, but ultimately decided a portfolio of roles and projects best suits the way I work. I continue to support the London startup community, contributing my thoughts and actions wherever I can help and add value. I have previously judged for Mass Challenge, Innotribe and judged at Unilever's ReHack event. I also do ad-hoc mentoring with various people and companies I meet.

In June 2017 I launched Touchpaper.org - a not for profit on a mission to make it much easier for startups and corporates to work together. I spent 18 months researching and working with the Touchpaper Founding Members (Google, Capgemini, Grant Thornton, Bristows, Nesta, Tech City UK, Multiple and Digital Catapult) and we released a free toolkit on how to make these collaboration run a little smoother than they usually do.

At this time, I also started working at The Bot Platform, who specialise in Facebook Messenger and Workplace by Facebook bots. The technology is great, and the concept of bots and how humans interact with them is a fascinating topic - the future is certainly going to be very interesting!