Personal details
I am 31 years old, live in Guildford, Surrey, and have spent most of my life in the Surrey area. I grew up immersed in, amongst other things, entrepreneurial business and the latest information technology developments thanks to my Dad who was himself a technology entrepreneur (co-founder of Alphameric Plc).
I wanted to be things when I "grew up": To be a business woman. To my amazement, I achieve the latter part of my dream after undergoing a transsexual transition two years ago.
Education
I was privately educated, which is a good thing since I was a horribly lazy child and probably would not have gone very far without the peer-pressure to succeed at the schools I attended! I obtained a fairly usual smattering of GCSE's, and went on to take Maths with Mechanics, Chemistry and Biology at A-level.
Although the obvious choice would have been for me to do an IT degree, I had heard that the computer science courses were in general rather dull and I would probably spend the first year or two twiddling my thumbs while I was taught things I either already knew, or did not need to know. Therefore I opted to do a subject of personal interest and went to Southampton University to study for a Masters degree in Biomedical Science. I left Soton Uni in 1999 with a 2:1.
Career
As hinted at above, I had a powerful interest in business and computing from an early age (yes, OK, I was a bit of a geeky! :), and even at the age of 12 was to be found on the playground selling BBC Master computer game software to my fellow pupils.
By the time I reached university I was earing some extra pennies as a part-time IT consultant and had demonstrated have a slight flair for interface design, which naturally led itself to Web development work. My main clients/employers during that period were Alphameric Plc and Alphawave Ltd., which specialises in control and monitoring software for satellite systems.
After leaving University I spent a short period of time working as a Web developer for MBA Systems Ltd, which specialises in online trading solutions for financial institutions.
Early in 2000 I moved to what I thought would be my actual career path and joined the now deceased Arthur Andersen as one of their IT Business Consultants (not to be confused with Andersen consulting who are now thriving as Accenture, but basically the same sort of work; ie. management consultancy). I had a very brief career with them since I was poached by Easyspace Ltd, at the time the UK's largest Web hosting and domain registration company, for whom I had previously worked as an e-commerce developer.
I spent two and a half years with Easyspace and rapidly expanded my role from lead e-commerce developer to development team manager and head of business development, and gained invaluable experience and insight into the burgeoning Internet hosting sector.
In late 2002 I felt the time had come to move on, and teamed up with my brother Nick to found Memset Ltd..
