Right now I'm CEO at Sixty-5, a small agri-tech company. We make Grass Guide - a sprayer guidance product - and have shifted over 700 systems in just over 3 years.
I can also undertake tech projects, inside or outside of Sixty-5.
In addition I am a Director of the charity Farset Labs, which is a community-focused tech charity providing community-accessible workspaces to facilitate STEAM outreach and education in Northern Ireland
I build stuff.
Since 1995 I have essentially been building startups. This has involved writing code, messing with databases, playing with servers and contributing to business strategy.
With a mixed background of hands-on technical, business, sales & marketing I cross the boundary between business and technical – much more business focused than most technical people, and much more technical than most business people, with the ability to BS both as necessary.
For the past too many years to actually remember, my main role has been as CTO.
Having recruited and managed teams of techies, delivered projects and all that kind of stuff to senior level, I can guide a business through the maelstrom of despair that is modern technology, to a place somewhat less despairing. And back.
Taking ideas and turning them into something that looks vaguely like an actual product. Pragmatically at all times.
I can write code that kind of works (Android, Ruby on Rails + others) and connect hardware together that kind of doesn’t explode.
I cause it and I shoot it. Trouble, that is.
When not causing it I have been known to create solutions. Not all involving duck tape.
As a CTO/Head of IT (for a Tesco company) I have been through the lifecycle of an online subscription business – from start-up through acquisition, expansion and on to multi-million revenue enterprise-level operation.
To do this, I have built networks and installed servers, written application code, set up and managed databases, recruited and line-managed over 40 tech staff and been closely bound to the business needs along the way, including negotiation on licencing and SLAs.
In addition to 40 years of IT experience (I wrote my first line of code in 1977), I have experience of business development, lead sourcing and the marketing and face-to-face selling of physical products and software development services, as well as a number of directorships along the way.
I love taking ideas and turning them into something that works. I can also take things that work and turn them into things that, for some reason, don't work exactly the way they did a few minutes ago.