I spent the first decade of my career in advertising.
It was probably the perfect education for what came next. Different industries. Different people. Different problems. Strategy sitting next to creativity. Creativity being forced to meet commercial reality.
I became fascinated by what happens when things that don’t naturally belong together suddenly do.
Industries. Disciplines. Cultures. People. Ideas. And occasionally common sense.
Then I left the relative sanity of advertising and started building businesses.
Four of them, so far.
They’ve taken me from creative technology and live experiences to personalised publishing, ecommerce and AI.
Pictures Experience started with a simple idea: could technology make photography at live experiences more interesting?
It grew into a platform used across Europe, connecting brands, physical experiences, technology and the very human desire to take a memory home.
Then came personalised publishing.
beans&sparks was built around a simple idea: a child could become part of the story rather than simply reading it.
We reached more than 200,000 customers in the US and UK and around $1.5 million in annual revenue.
It eventually ran out of road.
Which is the less glamorous part of entrepreneurship people tend to edit out of their biographies.
I don’t particularly want to.
Because building something, scaling it and then watching circumstances change teaches you things that success alone never will.
So naturally, I built another one.
Petite Giants returned me to personalised children’s stories, but with everything I’d learned the first time around.
And Pictures Experience has meanwhile come full circle too. Today I’m exploring what happens when AI enters the photograph and a simple picture becomes almost any imaginable output.
Different businesses. Different technologies. But the connecting thread seems fairly obvious.
People. Creativity. Technology. Experience.
And the interesting things that happen between them.
There were three other projects running simultaneously.
My daughters.
I built four businesses while having and raising three children, which has made the idea of work life balance seem increasingly theoretical.
The two worlds have never been particularly separate anyway.
Building companies and raising children both involve uncertainty, improvisation, negotiation, occasional chaos and discovering that whatever worked perfectly yesterday may be completely useless by Tuesday.
And children possess something I’ve become increasingly interested in professionally:
They haven’t yet accumulated quite so many reasons why something can’t work.
Somewhere along the way, my curiosity became broader than my businesses.
I’ve become increasingly interested in creativity itself.
Why do some environments produce more unexpected ideas than others?
Why do people from different disciplines sometimes see possibilities that experts miss?
Can serendipity be designed?
What happens to human creativity when AI becomes part of the process?
And how much of originality is actually just the ability to connect things other people have kept separate?
That curiosity has taken me into writing, experiments around human connection, creative communities and ideas like 100 HUMANS.
It has also made me increasingly suspicious of staying inside one discipline for too long.
Which brings me here.
This website isn’t really a portfolio.
And it definitely isn’t an attempt to make my career look as though somebody planned it.
Nobody did.
It’s a place where the different parts can finally live together.
Entrepreneurship. Creativity. Technology. AI. Art. Human connection.
Businesses I’ve built. Ideas I’m exploring. Things I’m writing. Questions I haven’t answered yet.