I've been working since I was twelve. Not a figure of speech — a paper round and a job in the local newsagent, around twenty hours a week, starting at five in the morning, six days a week. I've not really stopped since.
It started with a paper round
My mum and dad never had much money. When my friends started getting pocket money, mine came with a catch: a little each week, or a proper present at Christmas and on my birthday — not both. I took the presents. But I still wanted money of my own, and by 1995 I had something to save for: a computer, and the phone bills I was quietly running up on my dad's dial-up modem. So I got the paper round, then the shop job, and I've earned my own way ever since. I think that's where the bootstrapper in me was born.
From artificial intelligence to actual biology
At A-level I took Biology, Computer Science and Psychology, and in 2002 I was accepted onto a degree in Artificial Intelligence. Then, at the last possible moment — more taken with the natural world than the synthetic one — I switched to straight Biology instead.
It turned out to be a turning point. I hadn't much enjoyed school: I was crippled by anxiety and shyness, perpetually exhausted from those early mornings, and I never took to being talked at all day. University was different. Mine was a red-brick, research-first place — less interested in teaching me facts than in handing me the tools to go and find things out for myself. I loved it. Given the choice, I traded taught modules for a second dissertation and wrote two: one on whether biofuel agriculture could ever be a genuinely green alternative fuel (I concluded it couldn't — about fifteen years before the rest of the world caught up), and one building and running a computer-modelled epidemiological simulator with a maths post-doc, to understand how diseases spread.
A business, and a crash
By the time I graduated I'd run out of patience for exams and essays, so I turned down a PhD offer from one of my favourite lecturers and went as far the other way as I could: I started a property development business. Hands-on, physical, and — for a while — promising, right up until the market fell out from under it in 2007–08. I took the hint. The universe, it seemed, had other plans.
Marketing, and the best advice I ever took
What followed was a run of temp jobs — anything that paid — which eventually landed me back at my old university, helping out in the marketing team. I knew almost nothing about marketing, and what little I thought I knew, I didn't much like. But social media was just finding its feet, and as marketing turned more technical it started to genuinely interest me. I worked my way up to become something of a university-wide evangelist for social and digital marketing.
Around then my grandfather passed away and left me a little money. Wondering what to do with it, I found myself watching a video interview on Yahoo Finance in which someone asked almost exactly my question — what should a twentysomething who's come into a bit of money invest it in? The answer stuck: yourself. So I did. I enrolled on an Executive MBA and spent three years on it part-time while working full-time. It opened my mind, and genuinely changed the trajectory of my life.
IAM Cloud
About two years into that MBA, I met a man called Adam at a party in Sheffield. He was just starting a company called IAM Cloud, built on an idea he'd had while working as an identity-management consultant. I knew next to nothing about identity management from an IT point of view — but talking to Adam, I could see how relevant it was about to become as everything moved to the cloud.
IAM Cloud is a bootstrapped software company Adam Cosby founded in 2011. I came on board a couple of years later, at first freelancing on their marketing. When the two other original founders moved on, I stepped in as Adam's new partner — first as Director of Marketing, then, shortly after, as Chief Operating Officer. We split the business cleanly in two: Adam takes the technology, I take the business. It's run more or less that way ever since.
We began as a SaaS single-sign-on and identity platform, but as Microsoft folded that same territory ever more firmly into its own cloud — Azure AD, now Entra — we had to manoeuvre and diversify to avoid being squashed. One of those turns gave us Cloud Drive Mapper: a tool that lets you work with cloud storage on your computer as though it were a local drive, using file-system virtualisation and a middleware layer to pull it off. Today more than 4,000 organisations around the world run it as a core part of the workflow between their people and their cloud storage. It's my main focus — and, as I write this, we're working on taking the whole idea somewhere new. Watch this space.
Captivated
AI has upended the technology landscape in an astonishingly short time, and Captivated is my response to it: an experimental side-project company I started with my wife — a place to dabble with ideas in and around software and AI. Really, it's me scratching a creative itch that's built up over years at IAM Cloud, where I've spent a lot of time enviously watching my talented technical colleagues build cool things while my own head is buried in legal documents, spreadsheets and sales data, a long way back from the front line.
How I think about building
You can probably see the through-line by now: start early, invest in yourself, and back things built to last rather than built to flip. Most of what I believe about building companies I've tried to set down over on the Blog. Bootstrapping, for me, has never been a constraint to resent — it's rather the point.
Away from the desk
When I'm not working, I'm often behind a camera — there's a wall of photographs from around the US in the Photowall. And I tinker: with code, and lately with a little synthwave engine built from scratch, which may well be playing on this very page (there's a sound toggle in the footer). Yorkshire is home.
The best places to find me are LinkedIn, or through IAM Cloud and Captivated.