Who was your hero when you were growing up?
I love science and space and was fascinated by the moon landings from a very early age. So, my heroes growing up were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. I still love watching any moon related documentaries and films, particularly the 1990s Dark Side of the Moon.
What was your big career break?
There have been a number of key phases in my career. My very first job was when I joined Easynet in 1996 at the age of 18 as a technical support agent. This was originally intended to be a gap year, but I loved it. I went to university for three months but returned to Easynet. The lucky break was that they took me back and I got wrapped up in their networking systems team in the brand-new and exciting internet industry.
Career break number two was again at Easynet in about 2000. I was working as a presales solution architect and decided I wanted to create my own products. My first offering was a VPN managed firewall product, which now looks alarmingly similar to the SD-WAN products of today.
The third break was much later at Claranet when I was promoted to the role of technical director. This was a huge opportunity to broaden my experience and where I had the good fortune to work with a large team of very talented and highly skilled technical engineers.
Joining Highlight in 2017 has given me the opportunity to combine all this experience and show how Highlight can help both enterprises and service providers achieve
the best outcomes from all their networking services.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I wanted to be a sound engineer. I was heavily involved in my school’s theatre productions, but rather than being an actor I was always interested in the sound area. For a short while I did start my degree in engineering and acoustics at Southampton University, but the networking industry had captured my interest and imagination.
If you could dine with any famous person, past or present, who would you choose?
I’d love to have met Alan Turing. I think he would be a fascinating person to talk to, although at the time he was so misunderstood and mistreated that I doubt we’d talk much about computing or science! To be honest I don’t tend to hold much regard for modern celebrities, I’d be far more interested in talking to a refugee to understand what’s happened in their life and how we can learn from it.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?
‘Start a pension as soon as you can’ was the valuable advice given to me at 18 by an excellent head of finance at Easynet.
Another bit of advice he gave me has proved extremely useful over the years. It was to ‘never let systems get in the way of good business’ – so if you can solve a customer’s problem, you can always fix the systems later. At the time, he was talking about the complexity of billing systems.
If you had to work in a different industry, which would you choose?
I’ve been running The Level Up Laptop Appeal since 2019, so if I wasn’t working for Highlight, I’d focus on making this a much bigger thing.
I set up the appeal during the initial Coronavirus lockdown when I began hearing that schools in my local area of Horley, Surrey were losing touch with large numbers of students because they didn’t have anything to study on at home. Through my industry connections, I have been given old laptops and computers and once refurbished, the devices are sent to the disadvantaged children.
To date, we have donated 2,000 laptops.
This work is very rewarding, and whilst still in the tech industry, I would give it my full attention with greater focus on helping young people and particularly young girls in STEM education. Gender stereotypes are still a major issue, and I believe it is preventing many young girls from entering a career in science and engineering.
The Rolling Stones or the Beatles?
Beatles, 100%. Love Me Do is a current favourite mainly because my son is learning it on his guitar for GCSE music. I Feel Fine and Day Tripper are my other favourites.
What would you do with £1 million?
I would push forward with my Level-Up Charity and really make it happen, that’s what I’d do.
