By Bill Robinson (drew.cullen at theregister.co.uk)
Published Wednesday 12th October 2005 14:45 GMT
TechScape Richard Stubbs speaks at a mile a minute - unusual for an
Englishman, I’ve found. He also a self-admitted “tech geek” who’s
managed to learn social skills and network through music, hanging out
programming and hacking at uni and keeping his finger on the pulse of
technology.
And there's another unusual thing about Stubbs - in his case the geek
finally gets the girl.
Sitting with two laptops balanced on his knees, two external hard
drives on the floor between his legs and his Dell PDA on the table in
front of him, he’s a master juggler of high-tech chainsaws.
While he’s installing Fedora on one laptop, he’s furiously surfing
the net and showing me different interesting sites, new technology
and commenting with insults or praise in equal measure.
This young man is amusing - at first I wasn’t so sure that a complete
lack of focus on anything for more than 30 seconds was a good thing,
but it turned out to be infectious and liberating.
Richard Stubbs is a fun guy to be around. It’s because he’s so
interesting, so interested and so passionate.
He may also represent an example of the most important economic
demographic for the future of the UK: the homegrown technology
entrepreneur. If the UK churns out more local brainpower like Stubbs,
the economic and financial future of the UK within the EU will be
bright.
Take Ireland, for example, which turned its economy around from 19.8
per cent unemployment to a surplus of jobs. How? Simple - just ensure
there are enough tempting posts for graduates so they don't run off
abroad and "brain drain" the country into recession. Provide decent
housing and facilities for your tech community and there you have it -
economic growth.
And Britain must do the same; with intention and commitment.
Stubbs, of course, has no idea I’m positioning him as Cool
Britannia’s future, he’s just rambling on about the coolness of
Netcraft and how many of the world’s websites with the least downtime
are running on FreeBSD.
So, just what has Stubbs contributed to the UK economy so far? Well,
he joined his first board of directors at 19, but more of that later.
Here's how the whizz infant got started and eventually became the
whizz, er, young man he is now.
When he was six, Stubbs's Dad - who had an accountancy firm in London
- brought home the first computer for Richard, an Apple II (he’s very
nostalgic about this Apple dinosaur, saying: “I still have it; when I
get rich and famous, I’m going to get it reconditioned and put it on
display.”) The Apple soon gave way to an IBM PC and Stubbs started
saving up to buy a 386. He admits: “I wanted a 486 DX266 - whoa!! -
but couldn’t afford it.”
Nonetheless, “The 386 did the trick through school, almost. I liked
it because it had a VGA screen.”
An Amstrad 1512 followed, which “ran a GEM desktop which was rather
good - GEM Paint was great, I loved the spray can,” Stubbs enthused.
In 1996, he progressed to his first laptop, a DEC that ran Windows
3.11, which he also still has.
“Strangely enough,” Stubbs admits, “my best computers were a couple
of custom-built jobbies which I made for myself.” From 1993 on,
Stubbs was surrounded by a plethora of computer parts remaindered and
cannibalized from his numerous machines.
“When I was four years old, my older brother Marcus had a Commodore
64 which using a programming magazine, he and his friend had plugged
in a tape deck then typed 'load' and it began playing ‘Row, row, row
your boat.’ I was fascinated,” Stubbs recalls.
He continued: “Then I took the very same programming magazine
(remember, this is a four-year old), typed out a simple BASIC program
from the magazine, typed the ubiquitous ‘run’ and the response told
me there was an ‘error in the code.’ The manual suggested I type
‘list’ and as if by magic thousands of lines of code appeared. I was
hooked.”
Stubbs remembers seeing the film War Games and being influenced by it
tremendously. “I tried to unscrew the telephone (to emulate Matthew
Broderick’s modem lines in the movie) just being inquisitive. I also
had a massive line printing feeder with a massive sound-proofing box
that was fun to keep my toys in. At this point, I’m five or six years
old.”
Here, the subject changes to Stubbs’ dyslexia. Of course, dyslexia is
no indication of intelligence, so no big deal, I say. For Stubbs
however, it is a very big deal. “It’s soul-destroying and totally
demoralizing for me,” he stated strongly. “It’s so frustrating to
have to have other people constantly proofread what I’ve written,” he
barked. “Everyone knows I can’t spell but I find it so annoying. In
school they wanted me to type out papers because my handwriting is so
atrocious.”
And at school, age 13, Stubbs finally got to make some IT mischief:
“My school had Novell Netware and I could just run amok. There was a
special debugger which allowed me to get into the console. We gave
ourselves extra storage, staff folder access and Super User status.”
Wasn’t he afraid of getting caught? “No, we were undetectable; you
learn to hide your tracks,” he divulged with an enormous grin, “we’d
find students who left the school and use their accounts.”
Speaking of his time studying computers at the College of Arts &
Technology in Eastbourne, Stubbs said there were “a bigger and better
computer system and a couple of nice-looking girls”, with the
emphasis on the girls. He met his best friend there and the mother of
his child, and also acted as Treasurer of the Student Union - an
excellent opportunity to socialise, get into music and sink a few
thousand pints.
But, he admitted, “it was not challenging enough for my mind.”
He moved on to the University of Brighton, where “there was a good
atmosphere and really insightful lecturers but I learned nothing. I
knew it all about computers. The only thing I learned at Uni was
Business. I knew Technology and the next thing was to make money out
of it.”
Stubbs didn’t finish university, though he says it bugs him and he
intends to finish up someday. “I didn’t finish university because I
started making money,” he recalled, “especially in my industry, you
don’t necessarily have to have a degree - experience and knowledge is
more important.”
“I’d been making websites since 1995,” Stubbs said, “and I saw the
dot-coms making money and knew I could do the same.” Stubbs' first
business - which didn’t survive the Tech Wreck - was called “English
Village” and involved building e-commerce stores for people with
things to sell. “It was money for nothing really,” Stubbs says,
“these businesses were riding the dot-com wave and when that tanked,
well our business did too.”
Stubbs then found himself in an Eastbourne pub with friend Mark
Roberts, an Aussie with a business background, discussing politics.
The subject shifted through Democracy, on-line voting/polling and how
“can we inspire people’s interest in their local councils?”
“People don’t go to or get involved in their local council meetings,”
Stubbs explained, “so we came up with a web-casting service for the
UK councils which allows residents to get involved; watch council
meetings on their mobile phones; go to an internet café; go into
archives and watch their councilors and what they said and how they
voted.” UK Council Ltd. (http://www.public-i.info/) was born.
What the Stubbs/Roberts' initiative did was to install the cameras,
hardware and servers for the council and handle the broadcasting of
meetings over the internet. This increased council transparency to
the taxpayers, offered a better way to interest citizens, and
eliminated the need to disseminate information via expensive printed
mailers.
This enterprise was self-funded by Stubbs and Roberts until they
successfully raised £1 million from investors.
In 2001, Stubbs left UK Council Ltd., although he remains a
significant stockholder. He then worked for a start-up - where he
supplied all of the technical and programming acumen with a
particular emphasis on networking - and began to mull new
possibilities.
He was concentrating on building a very big, interconnected business.
He wanted it to provide networking services to customers then also
subsume their web apps, bespoke system design and software
development for the clients they initially engaged for network
services. “This is a heavily open-standards-based business,” Stubbs
insisted animatedly.
The Network Factory (www.thenetworkfactory.co.uk) is Stubbs’ new
business. This start-up counts amongst its clients the UK’s largest
monthly-turnover online mortgage processor for whom they designed a
bespoke system and also run all other IT systems. “Everybody says
they do ‘bespoke systems’ but at the end of the day, they’ve just
installed other people’s products,” Stubbs observed pointedly.
“We design the software, hardware and use best-of-breed technology,”
he said with satisfaction.
This kind of passion/enthusiasm is the crucial ingredient in any
entrepreneurial enterprise development. Without it, the start-up is
doomed. Britain’s entrepreneurs must seize and maintain this
motivated maverick mindset in order for this country to build
anything even faintly resembling Silicon Valley.
However, to suggest that ultimate success is just a matter of pure
energy would be misleading. Stubbs is expecting his first child soon.
Until that happy event, he has got to get his cash flow together and
scale his business baby quickly. Then, and only then, can he build
something robust and sustainable. ®
Bill Robinson has appeared on CNN, PBS, Bloomberg and had his own
segment on SKY News commenting on high-tech and marketing issues and
has written columns and articles for FORTUNE Small Business, The
Financial Times, Marketing Magazine (UK), Forbes.com, The Moscow
Times, Cisco Systems iQ Magazine, United Airline's Hemispheres
Magazine and Upside Magazine. Bill may be reached at:
[email protected]
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