The story so far

In case you felt inclined to read it all…

Chapter one - The Start of the Story

My first love was imaging. I cut my teeth designing integrated analog-to-digital converters starting with a focus in 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. ST’s a huge company but the Edinburgh office came to be off the back of a local tech company acquisition call Vision/VVL, and it hadn’t lost that startup charm 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 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 company. 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 A and B VC rounds, grew to about 70 people, office 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. That’s when I got a taste of what can be done with signal processing while hanging on to my love of analog. But in reality 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. We found ourselves in Broadcom, a large American multination. The guys there were again amazingly generous towards me, I got exposed to the incredible projects going on and interesting engineering structure.

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 analog and signal processing and analytics in the space of energy measurement and management. 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, I was dazzled by the technical openness and generosity in this company. 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 hence 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 Next Big Thing

So I left again. This is 2019, I wanted to do yet another new kind of startup, I wanted to experiment with a new business model, and my technology edge was around signal processing, machine-learning powered, particularly for human voice and picture processing, target market, I guess audio/video call/conferencing, or as I like to call it digital human communication. 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, and so far it’s been pretty interesting. The company is called Pommelhorse, and we create technology to help our customers do the most extraordinary signal processing gymnastics and summersaults. This chapter has just started…