Championing Cambridge innovation

What's your connection to the University? I did a maths degree at Cambridge, then started Part III Maths which I left halfway through for a PhD in fluid mechanics at Imperial - which I left halfway through to found a start-up. You can see a pattern emerging!

What was the start-up? STNC, which ended up being the first company in the world to put web browsers onto mobile phones.

When we started in the early 1990s, mobile phones were becoming a thing but only for voice calls and text messages. They certainly didn't have colour displays, cameras or email.

My co-founder was one of the very few experts in computer networking at the time and we started offering a solution for email for low-cost, low-power hand-held devices.

We would go to meetings and people would say things like: "Why on earth do we need email when we've got a perfectly good fax machine? Who wants to send an email from their phone?"

We grew very slowly to start with and then the internet happened, almost overnight.

We were one of the few companies in the world that understood its possibilities. By that stage, there were 10 of us and we had some of the world's largest tech companies queuing at our door.

Two things happened in parallel. Everyone wanted to get on the internet and mobile phones started to carry small amounts of data.

We were able to create a web browser that used less than 200 kilobytes and found ourselves in a unique space, doing something that no-one else could just as the internet was bursting into everyone's lives.

You must have been growing very quickly at this point? We were. We decided to take external investment to ride the opportunity. From then on, we were doubling in size every year.

We started to work with Microsoft which eventually led to them acquiring us and our software becoming Microsoft Mobile Explorer.

Was it always your ambition to start your own company or was it more accidental than that? For me, it was accidental. For my co-founder, it was always the goal. Although I liked the idea of working for myself, I hadn't been exposed to technology start-ups when I was growing up.

In my world, running your own business meant having a shop or running a care home. But when I came to the University, the Cambridge-designed Acorn Archimedes was just coming out and I began to understand the potential of the tech sector for someone like me.

When Microsoft acquired the company, you went to work for them. What was that like? I went in with absolutely no idea of what big company rules and processes looked like. I proceeded to trample all over them until I discovered what I was and wasn't allowed to do.

What was your role in Microsoft? Initially, I was part of the group adding mobile features to Microsoft Exchange but I then moved into the Windows Media Group, which was the precursor to MP3 players.

That was really interesting but, honestly, I don't do well in big companies. I tried at Microsoft and I tried at Hutchison 3G which was a start-up when I joined and employed 2,000 people by the time I left two years later.

By 2005 - which was only six years after we sold the company - I had realised that big companies don't suit me. I figured out that the bit I really like is the early stage where you've got something interesting, but you don't quite yet know what the product is or who your customers are.