The story so far

In case you felt inclined to read it all…

Chapter one - The Start

My first love was imaging. I cut my teeth designing analog-to-digital converters for mobile imaging. There’s a magic to imaging, it has everything, electronics, software, signal processing, mechanics, optics, and grounded in physics, and at the end the quality of your work is measured on how good the picture looks.

For me this was at the Edinburgh office of STMicroelectronics. The Edinburgh office of STMicro came to be off the back of a local tech company acquisition call Vision/VVL, and it hadn’t lost that startup feel when I was there.

Working there was amazing, there was a couple of characters that seemed to be more interested in teaching the juniors like me the tricks of the trade rather then doing their actual work, and I took full advantage of that.

Chapter two - The Big Break

Then this big guy in imaging, Jed Hurwitz, left ST to start a new company call Gigle Networks with some friends, he asked me if I fancied joining his startup. It was pre funding, and I was young and stupid so I said yes. Our first server was in my cupboard and we got down to business.

We were making powerline communication technology. We took the company through an A and B VC rounds, grew to about 70 people, with offices in Edinburgh, Barcelona and the Valley, for some minor few seconds we had 10% market share, and we were acquired by Broadcom in 2010 after 6 years.

I went in as a techy, but I learned a lot about business, operations, companies, teams, morale, engineering, innovation, you name it, oh and of course, working really really hard. It was an amazing time.

Post acquisition, the guys at Broadcom were again amazingly generous towards me, I was exposed to the incredible projects and interesting engineering structures, but…

Chapter three - The Hustle

In the end I didn’t stay in Broadcom too long, I had the startup itch I had to scratch. I left and started Metroic with some of the old gang, we were doing some fancy HW and signal processing in the energy space, to predict and detect when equipment was about to fail and be tampered with. This was a very different kind of startup, we never took any funding, we hired some amazing people proved out our technology, and after 3 years exited to Analog Devices, it was too good a deal to turn down.

We landed in this large famous multinational, and a whole new journey. I stayed at Analog for the longest I’ve ever worked anywhere. People here were extremely open and technically generous. Everyone wants to tell you about all the cool stuff they’re working on, and there was a lot of cool stuff happening.

I got to work on some amazing projects during my time there, and we got to constantly push the limits of what people expected this company to do. I got close with some amazing business leaders and thinkers and spent endless hours discussing innovation, business models, and organisations, moving up the value stack, obviously also human evolutionary theory and ‘what is a system’, but in the end the boys gotta do what a boys gotta do…

Chapter four - The Pommelhorse of Amazing Tricks

So I left again. This is 2019, I wanted to do yet another new kind of startup, I wanted to build amazing technology and experiment with new business models. Image and Video processing was and continues to go through a renaissance with advances in AI, and I believed a much better communication possibility is possible.

I started Pommelhorse with my friend Martin, to do exactly this. Then of course Covid happened and this market turned on its head, and we were just starting when the washing machine hit the top spin cycle. We brought in some extremely talented people, and we created some of the most ground breaking real-time video processing technology, creating calling experiences like you’re sharing physical space with people you communicate with.

With amazing technology in our hand, it was time to figure out what to do with it, and how to turn this into a business, so we went on the hunt for where better communication was really needed, and what model would allow us to build a true category defining company. This was right at the time of AI and LLM explosion, and we brought in that technology along side our real-time image processing technology, and we had something really powerful, and a group a customer base that wanted to rip it out of our hands…

Chapter five - Its all about the Family

The market was families, and family-to-family communication in particular. We poured everything we’ve developed at Pommelhorse into this, the project and now company is called Higlo, and we’re all in. It’s just the start, this chapter is not yet written…