Mentor, Maxwell Impulse programme / May, 2025 — Present

Mentoring bright young teams of post-doc first-time entrepreneurs as they navigate the University's Impulse accelerator programme, run out of the Maxwell Centre.

VP Energy Services / April, 2023 — Present

Intrapraneur role (first time working in someone-else's company for 25 years!). Brought into Pod by founder Erik to build a grid flexibility platform and offering - basically a startup inside Pod. Building on the 15 years of hard slog the company had already done to get 250,000 assets in the market, and with a small-but-great team, we got from zero to 7 figures of grid flex ARR in just 18 months. This has help turn the company from an innovation laggard into a leader, and the flex revenue unlocked has powered the transition of the whole company towards a pure service model, "Pod Drive". By Oct 2025 Pod had shifted more than 5GWh of electricity, growing at 1.5GWh/mo.

Founder / February, 2013 — April, 2023

DevicePilot enabled companies with connected devices to manage them effectively - and so to scale from trial into full deployment. A SaaS, it worked with any platform, and includes asset management, monitoring and alerting and lifecycle management. EV charging provider Pod was one of our largest customers.

Chair, IET Innovation Awards judging panel (Startup category) / January, 2012 — January, 2022

I had great fun for 10 years chairing the judging panel for the Startup category in the annual IET Innovation Awards.

Founder / September, 2006 — March, 2015

Co-founded this Smart Home platform startup with Adrian Critchlow. Over 9 years we grew the company until it had deployed millions of connected devices into homes in the USA and UK and to an eventual $100m exit in 2015. AlertMe's hardware and software platform was the basis of British Gas' "Hive" smart home offering, which ten years later is the UK's leading smart home platform, with more than 2m recurring users, and has saved its customers £500million in energy. https://www.centrica.com/media-centre/news/2025/brits-save-half-a-billion-on-energy-bills-with-hive-smart-thermostats/

Visiting Industrial Fellow / December, 2012 — September, 2013

Having fun thinking about Internet of Things architectures and semantics.

VP R&D / January, 2002 — September, 2006

Seed investor and VP Innovation at this wireless charging startup. We created technology to deliver power inductively to multiple devices simultaneously, regardless of position or orientation, and to charge them as fast as if they were plugged-in, which was described by Tier 1's of the time such as Nokia, Motorola etc. as simply "magic".

Founder / January, 1998 — January, 2001

Founded activeRF on my return to UK from Silicon Valley, to focus on short-range location-based radio technology.

Founder / January, 1999 — January, 2000

At my previous startup activeRF we needed some expert help with antenna design, found a professor who could help - and then discovered he was working on something really interesting. So we spun Antenova out, with IP transfer from Sheffield and Brisbane Universities, around electrically-steerable high-dielectric antennas. The company still exists today, and has shipped billions of multi-band antenna systems, mainly into smartphones and laptops, the main USP being immunity to proximity issues.

Engineering Manager, Audio Software / January, 1995 — January, 1998

Chromatic built a "media-processor" called the MPACT which was in some ways a forerunner of today's GPUs, being a SIMD VLIW processor capable of 7GFLOPS sustained back in 1995. In those days, a PC consisted of a set of cards: graphics, audio, modem, 2D, 3D, DVD. We replaced all these cards with a $10 chip and a lot of software (30 sets of Microsoft drivers!). It was a 300-person engineering tour-de-force, reached the market (shipped by Gateway). Highlight for me was demoing live DVD playback (we had the world's first software DVD decoder) to Bill Gates whilst playing a 3D game. I joined as a software engineer in the Audio team and was then promoted to run it. A huge privilege to work with people like Joe Bryan (alumnus of Korg etc.), Phil Wiser (Liquid Audio), and Avery Wang (CTO of Shazam).

Manager, Processing Systems / January, 1995 — January, 1998

Senior Engineer / January, 1994 — January, 1995

Digital and Software Engineer / January, 1988 — January, 1992

I was incredibly lucky to land this role fresh out of Uni. SSL was already the established global leader in mixing desks for rock stars, which in those days were completely analogue, and had recently formed a small new digital audio team, which I joined under the redoubtable Phil Hill (ex-Quantel). Digital audio was really hard then - ADCs only worked to about 14 bits, and to be able to record 8 tracks to a hard drive simultaneously we had to buy special drives from Fujitsu which allowed parallel head access. For multiply-accumulate we used Harris chips designed for military radar. I got to do software, board-level and even chip-level design (MIDAS ASIC for routing and soft-switching audio). In retrospect it was amazing what I was allowed to do - creating new propositions like being able to sync-up multiple audio+video recorders (including "swiping" from one touchpad to the next) just because I was playing-around one evening seeing just what Ethernet could achieve.

Entrepreneur in Residence, Spark 2.0 programme / August, 2026 — Present

Hugely enjoying being part of the Spark 2.0 accelerator programme run by King's College Cambridge's E-lab - a great cohort of budding entrepreneurs and a fantastic programme crammed full of lessons from people who have "been there, done that".