A timeline of my life to date
June 10, 2001 - I am born in Chelmsford, Essex.
October 2003 - After the dot-com crash led to the near-bankruptcy of Marconi, where my father worked, we moved to Portland, Oregon for my father’s new job.
November 2004 - My family returns to England, and we begin renting in Lee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire, a small seaside town on the south coast with a population of around 7,000.
July 2006 - My parents buy a home in Fareham, Hampshire where I would spend the rest of my childhood.
September 2006 - Now 5 years old, I begin attending Meoncross School, a small, local independent school. Around this time, I am diagnosed with dyspraxia which makes many things harder, including writing and sports.
September 2008 - I move from Meoncross to Harrison Primary School, a state comprehensive school a few minutes from my home.
September 2012 - After finishing year 6, I start secondary education at Cams Hill School.
September 2017 - After finishing year 11, I begin my A-levels in mathematics, further mathematics, and computer science at Peter Symonds College in Winchester. I do not look back on this time fondly - my two years of sixth-form college were miserable and I was very unhappy.
January 2019 - At 17, while still studying at Peter Symonds, my team is a finalist in MIT Battlecode, a programming competition hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I take home half of $1250, my share of the winnings.
September 2019 - I scrape through my A-levels, earning an underwhelming B in mathematics, B in computer science, and D in further mathematics. Consequently, I was rejected from my first choice university - Loughborough University. My second choice, Cardiff University, accepted me to study computer science. Also in September, I founded Wutzu, and would begin work on it during my first year of study.
January 2020 - Someone I met on a dating app invited me to attend Cardiff’s debating society. I’d been rather isolated in my first semester as a result of long hours spent working on Wutzu. I decided to attend, and made fast friends with the odd group of eclectic nerds I met there.
March 2020 - Wutzu launches just as the COVID-19 pandemic hits the country and all students are told to return home.
May 2020 - I move to London following Wutzu’s first angel investment.
September 2020 - Wutzu struggles to compete with the sheer scale of growth capital being dumped into its competitors (literally hundreds of millions of dollars) and has no fast road to profitability. I apply to Entrepreneur First and am rejected. I instead start working at Modernbanc, a YC-backed fintech startup as its first employee.
March 2020 - I leave Modernbanc to found another startup. I try to start a productised service for B2B landing page maintenance that I call PageKnight.
August 2020 - I build some landing pages for fellow Y Combinator companies, but PageKnight ultimately doesn’t scale. I shut it down and re-apply to Entrepreneur First and this time am accepted.
September 2021 - At Entrepreneur First I co-found Simple Construction Software, a document workflow automation tool for the construction industry.
January 2022 - Simple Construction Software passes Entrepreneur First’s investment committee with strong recommendations to invest from all panelists.
September 2022 - After a year of working on Simple Construction, we’re not able to get the buy-in we need to achieve rollout on whole construction projects. We interview for Y Combinator but are rejected. I step away and begin leading the engineering team at Spot Health.