This is a story of a red flag that gets raised before disaster strikes...

Why does a person sink? Why do they get swamped? Why do they collapse inwards, under the gravity of their own infinite stress, sadness, blackness? Why do they implode in a spectacular supernova? Can we ever understand and relate to depression so deep that it would drive a person to take their own life? Can we make a difference? Can we empathise, help and ever rehabilitate somebody who has the clinical diagnosis of depression, without pills and a padded cell?

From my personal point of view, I have always felt that making a mistake leaves a dark stain on me, a black mark. People seem to have a very long memory for the mistakes I have made, and enjoy bringing up things that embarrass and upset me. In my career, the people who I need to impress and to promote me are always very keen to know about my weaknesses and flaws, seemingly as an excuse that I should "know my place" and not challenge the status quo.

The world has organised itself into a Pyramid Scheme, where there are a handful of unbelievably filthy rich oligarchs, sheikhs, kings, queens and emperors and other scum, who sit in their palaces, while their people starve in squalor. The trickle-down effect is a lie, spun by the courtiers, the sycophants in the entourage of the super-rich.

This wealth-worship has created a totally fake society, where newspapers, TV and the media, exists only to tell the proletariat that they are 'special' and 'unique' while at the same time, getting them to buy mass produced products from factories in China.

The best example of which is Apple and Beats by Dr Dre. There is a standard line amongst the creative community, that only a MacBook will suffice, as a the workhorse for the output of recording artists, graphic designers, web developers and startup founders. This is backed with the celebrity endorsement of footballers, who are seen arriving at matches wearing their 'individual' choice of a pair of overpriced Beats headphones.

I have always said that it's the software packages that are important, not the Operating System (OS) or the hardware, provided that both of those things are adequately up to specification to run the software. It's true that Apple stuff "just works" but anybody who foolishly accepts a new software release too early also finds that Apple do a lot of their testing by relying totally on the loyalty of their Fanboys.

I have mixed feelings about the largest consumer electronics company in the world. I think they are more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was in their heyday. When IBM's BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) was reverse engineered, which started the boom of IBM Personal Computer Compatible grey clones. This, along with Microsoft Disk Operating System (DOS) launched the home computer from the realm of labcoat wearing boffins, into the ubiquitous Internet-of-Things existance, where my car and my washing machine have an Application Programming Interface (API). This has been Bill Gates' vision for as long as I can remember.

I have always been fairly platform agnostic. I tend to go with whatever works, and ignore the marketing rhetoric and hyperbole.

That takes a lot of work and bravery, because at some point, people start to have vested interests. There are billions of dollars at stake in the tech industry. Apple majicked (sic.) a billion dollar App industry into existence more or less overnight. Who would have thought that paying 59 British pence for stupid little time-filling games (the developer used to keep 36 pence of that) would be so lucrative?

It also seems to take a lot of bravery to stick around and re-invest your cash in something worthy or pay the tax, because Apple seem to have precipitated a brain drain in the developed nations. I know far too many wealthy people who are hiding in tax havens, due to fear and greed. Why run away to South East Asia, taking your cash pile with you? What was wrong with paying tax or investing in somebody or something? What are you afraid of?

Perhaps I have little appreciation of risk? What's the worst that's going to happen to me though? The Conservative government will support me as a successful entrepreneur who invests in people, ideas, research & development. The Labour government will support me as a socialist who pays his taxes and does not try to evade them, recognising that the National Health Service, high quality schools and colleges, roads, libraries, street lighting, policing, fire service, trash collection, civic ameneties, community events, social services and the broad and rich spectrum of life in the United Kingdom is truly a model that every nation should aspire to emulate.

Feel the fear and do it anyway (Y2K)

Tags: #apple #computing #career #NHS #politics

This is a story of ambiguity and interpretation...

Does anybody remember the computer game Lemmings? It was probably one of the most influential games of my childhood. The Psygnosis development house was also responsible for Shadow of the Beast; and even today that game remains a piece of great artwork, which spans the visual and auditory mediums. Wot I mean iz the graffix and music is pure brilliant too, innit!

So what's that got to do with a rather camp picture of me from 2006? You tell me, Einstein.

Tags: #computing #LGBT #computergames #sailing

This is a story of a noncompetitive person who became a winner...

In September 2008 I won the Poole Animal Windfest. I then got into a waiting taxi and flew to India to work with my team on the DTCC project for JPMorgan. I didn't even have time to collect my prize or wash off the salt from my skin.

I didn't even realise I had won. When I reached the shore, I had travelled far downwind from the spectators, and it wasn't until I dragged my board and kite back up the beach and started to pack up that people said I had won the final heat

That year, I wrote a software testing framework called Message Oriented Testing (MOT... a pun on the UK's certificate of roadworthiness test for cars and other motor vehicles) as well as designing and leading the coding of the confirmations engine for Credit Default Swaps, that would work with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's API and the Financial Products Markup Language.

This test-driven approach delivered the project on time, despite me having to do it with completely inexperienced offshore resources, and the low number of defects left my bosses gobsmacked. I didn't realise any of this until somebody told me this a long time afterwards.

The truth is though, that was the last good code I wrote, and even that was a bit hacky. I don't really go in for Rolls-Royce solutions. Generally I'm useful when the client or customer needs something doing yesterday. When all the 'architects' have done fart-arsing around and the project is really late, that's the time that I ususually wake up and start hacking something together to get things over the finishing line.

Does that mean I'm a good hacker? In truth, not really. Doing these 'heroic' acts generally leaves me burnt out, and leaves the team with a pile of code which I'm the only person who understands. The deadline is met, but everybody else is left holding the baby, while I sleep off the 'hangover' from a work binge.

So what am I good at? Well, I'm honest - brutally honest - and I also really dislike the salesmen in software who promise the earth and then go back to their development team to give them the 'good news' that they have made the sale... provided the whole team can work for 25 hours a day, 9 days a week, for the next 17 months, and deliver in a year. We just need to make a little adjustment to the Gregorian calendar, no?

I do have a good background in Mathematics thanks to incredible teachers (my maths teacher at school taught me Matrix Mechanics after school, so I could write a 3D ray-tracing algorithm) and Computer Science (the same maths teacher also taught me and a few friends an extra GCSE in our lunch breaks) and I'm enough of a fast learner to pick up any new technology that's required of me to learn to a 'competant hacker' level... a colleague once kindly said I "hit the ground running like Linford Christie" but I think I will probably also fall over like Usain Bolt, unless I stop taking on these sprints.

I also love design and technology. I had the most brilliant D&T teachers throughout my school years. At age 15 I designed and built a motion-tracking device that fitted over a person's arm. I demonstrated it, along with the software I wrote, at Brunel University, as part of the Young Inventor of the Year competition. I think I got a prize, but I can't remember! I definitely think I have a certificate from the competition - which was awarded to me by the Rotary Club, in Lyme Regis - somewhere in the archives.

Now, what would be the perfect job for such a person? I actually have no idea. I've been trying everything I can possibly think of. I actually think, I'm pretty good at pursuading people to back other people's ideas. I guess that makes me a salesman?

The logos displayed are companies that the Hubflow platform was demo'ed to. We partnered with Video Arts, who then took it to their large customer base. Standard sales bullshit (July 2011)

Tags: #kiteboarding #kitesurfing #startup #entreprenuer #computing #banking #career

This is a story of a ragged trousered philanthropist...

For those who are unfamiliar with Robert Tressell's posthumously published book, it's a story about craftsmen - people with skill and dedication to their trade - who are so passionate about their work, that they virtually work for free.

Are their masters grateful, for the passion and diligence of their employees? No, they just try and exploit them further, asking them to work longer hours and never sharing the wealth that their workforce has generated.

So who is at fault? Well, I think this is a symbiotic relationship, and not master-slave as we would be led to believe by Tressell's rather bitter and overly satirical work of literature. You can't put a price on job satisfaction. As a craftsman, if you have enough money for rent and food, you are generally looking for job satisfaction before extra 000's on your paycheck.

However, what ends up happening is that while fiat currency wealth piles up in the bank accounts of the Industrialists and Capitalists, the real store of wealth is in the brains and muscle memory of the people who built the empire. For every bead of sweat, drop of blood, salty tear that is shed, there is intangible value that becomes locked into that person's experience bank.

The software engineers who built the banking system ARE the banking system, and its store of wealth, especially after Bretton Woods and the abolishment of the gold standard. Before these capital controls were relinquished, the store of wealth was the toil of miners, who had extracted an extremely rare heavy element, created in the supernovae of dying stars, from dark holes in the ground that they had dug, mostly by hand.

Now that I can create money at the stroke of a key, it is unsurprising that it has lost its intrinsic value. Douglas Adams joked about a society of estate agents, whose currency was leaves from trees. Unsurprisingly, this not-so-fictional society had terrible problems with inflation during autumn.

So, we are standing at a crossroads in global banking. We have insisted that our investment banks and insurance companies actually have sufficient collatteral to underwrite the Credit Default Swaps and other securities that they had been busy printing, which reached an aggregate notional value of nearly $60 trillion (i.e. approximately $10,000 for every man woman and child on the planet) despite this figure completely dwarfing the entire value of every company in the world, all the precious metals, all the fiat currency and all the houses and other buildings and land (plus any and all other securities - loans, bonds etc. - you might care to chuck in the bucket).

So that was clearly a ridiculous situation, and as soon as the DTCC had been built and the major counterparties were in the system, the Credit Crunch was allowed to happen so the rich could stay nice and rich. Do you see a poor banker? No.

However, investment banking is just nonsense. The purpose of our banking system should be to grease the wheels of commerce. The most enterprising businessmen, and the most rapidly expanding and profitable companies can grow faster if they are given the capital they need, rather than having to do everything organically... so goes the theory.

What we see instead, is banks lining their pockets at the expense of every man, woman and child on the planet. George Soros famously forced the UK out of the ERM by getting leverage from an investment bank, in order to place massive bets against the Treasury. He is rich, and evey citizen of the UK was commensurately poorer after Black Wednesday. In what version of reality is capitalism working for the greater good of society?

I shan't get into the stride of my tirade, talking about the American dream (which is to be crippled by medical care bills to satisfy the healthcare industry's financial interests) and other bugbears, but I would say that people have been well and truly shafted by bankers and politicians.

There is a silver lining:

If you ask a philanthropist to build you a bank, the wealth can finally flow back to the people (September 2015)

Tags: #banking #career #london #capitalism #computing #apple

This is a story of exploration, at the ragged limit of control...

Promises are easily made, but you have to make good on those promises if you really meant what you said. When I found myself without any money or support to build the startup that would set my conscience straight, for my involvement in the Credit Crunch, and help me back to health & wealth after separation from my wife, I had to think creatively.

I sank every penny I had, plus everything I could borrow from the banks and other commercial lenders (which was a lot... I am extremely creditworthy) into Bitcoin, in August 2013. This turned out to be a rather shrewd investment. Only one friend, Cameron, was wise enough to back me, and I think the return on his capital is likely to have exceeded a lifetime of Governement-backed tax free saving.

Another friend, Will, decided to copy my investment strategy, and had me to manage the purchase and sale of his Bitcoin Miner to maximise his profit. However, he decided to hold and try to run his profits on his Bitcoins, when I was cashing out in December 2013. The losses he sustained from that mark-to-market point, have been pretty eye-watering. Oh well; he's still suckling at the teet of Investment Banking, so he doesn't need the money.

Selling my house, dividing up all my posessions and trying to move what I could to London, as well as divorce paperwork and general breakup unpleasantness, plus having to risk everything just to keep my hopes & dreams alive, was the very last distraction I needed. Doing a startup is hard at the best of times. Moving is stressful. Leaving everything you've built and worked for is heart-wrenching. Doing it when you are unwell... it's enough to finish a person off.

And so, in the first half of 2014 I had to invest in myself. All my profit was re-invested in my health. I parked my dreams of building a social enterprise - a not-for-profit built to salve an aching conscience - built with knowledge gleaned from my obscenely rich masters.

Exactly how rich did I make my masters? Well, software I designed and delivered was responsible for the confirmation of $1,160,000,000,000,000 in Credit Default Swaps contracts in 2008. That's $165,714 for every man, woman and child on the planet. That's f**ked up.

A guy I worked with resigned in moral protest... but he was really just looking after himself: he bought gold at $550 a troy Oz and a chicken farm in New Zealand. I was disturbed by what we were doing, but I'm just a frustrated coder... I knew I could deliver the project for the bank... I didn't know how to say "no".

Scarcity, collatteral, securitisation: the basis for the non-insane version of capitalism (September 2013)

Tags: #startup #career #banking #capitalism #computing #divorce #friends

This is a story of a career spent in anonymity as a small cog in a big machine...

Any entrepreneur will tell you that overnight success takes many days, weeks, months, years or lifetimes. I can tell you exactly how long some of my successes took to build, and what the cost was: in terms of personal sacrifice.

Let's talk about my first startup, Bournesoft. I had needed to quit my job due to ill health, and as I recovered from the depression that followed, in July 2008, I taught myself to program games for the iPhone. I had 3 number one hits in the Apple App Store, in late August and early September.

The price I paid for this, was mood instability, which had been kept in check by the routine of office hours. With only a limited window of opportunity to make big cash in the App Store before every Indie Dev saw the opportunity, and then the big corporates moved in. I worked 18 hour days, and paid with my relationship with my partner, family, friends.

I also paid with my love of programming. I hated programming after having to learn Objective-C and the Apple platform under such pressure, which I put on myself. It was supposed to be a fun and confidence building excercise, that I had set for myself, having had an abrupt halt to a successful 11 year career as a software developer.

And so my next startup - www.bournemouthelectrician.co.uk - required significant retraining, but gave me the opportunity to work with my hands in a non-corporate environment, which I decided were my two priorities at the time. Unsurprisingly, there is not really an established training route for wealthy and successful IT professionals and Mobile App Indie Devs, into the building trade.

Undetterred, I incorporated a company (Bournemouth Technology Ltd) funded it myself with a director's loan, signed up for the training courses and got myself an IT contract to "fill the time" and keep the cashflow positive. As soon as I had passed the 17th Edition of the Wiring Regulations, C&G Periodic Inspection & Testing exams and had been inspected by the NICEIC, I bought a van and started trading.

In terms of sacrifice, I invested about 30% of what my lowest earning App had returned me. I also gave up an IT contract that was worth "a lot of money". But I hated programming and working in an office, remember, so I didn't view it as any kind of sacrifice at the time.

Until you have stood in a puddle of water in your customer's kitchen, when you have burst the cold water pipe into the house, or had to find the emergency cutoff as fast as you can when you have drilled through a gas pipe... you do not appreciate your desk, your swivel chair, your computer screen and your photocopier.

Anybody who says "stud finder" has not done any building work on older houses, which are full of the DIY-enthusiast's bodge-jobs, which are a daily risk to the life and livelihood of those in the building trade, who have to lift your horrible laminate flooring, crawl through your fibreglass filled loft, drill through your crumbling brickwork, and discover the creative plumbing you have plastered into your walls. "Why the f**k did they do it like that?" you find yourself asking far too many times. There is never a good answer. Regulations and professional standards exist for good reason.

When I was up to my elbows crawling around in shredded newspaper (creative insulation) dodging the exposed 230v A.C. live terminals of junction boxes that didn't have their lids any more, I got a phonecall asking if could I do a 2 week IT contract that would pay the same as rewiring two whole houses. I realised that I had finally learnt the value of the career I had left behind.

I managed to clear 2 weeks in my full diary of customer's jobs, but I avoided the unpleasant job that I really needed to grasp the nettle of. The right thing to do would have to been phone and cancel those jobs completely. Instead, I was exhausted from building my business from nothing to being a profitable company, and the shame of failing my customers drove me into a second lengthy depression. I did not fail gracefully. I don't feel too bad, because many members of the public I met tried to take advantage of hard-working and skillful tradesmen.

So, I started to retrace my steps. As my depression lifted, I built another Mobile Apps startup. This time selling to enterprise. I drove to one of the UK's largest insurers in my electrician's van, for a sales meeting. It started as Roam Solutions, and then became mEpublish.com and eventually, after the springboard(); TechStars program in Cambridge, it finally became hubflow.com.

Pushing myself so hard took me to the limits of human survival, costing me countless friends, my wife, all my money, my house, my boat, my cars, my hot tub, my summer house, all my tools of the trade. I would gladly pay double that, because it led me home, to London, reconnected me with my friends, and reignited my desire to continue living, liberated from fear of losing material possesions and unhealty relationships.

I'm the one taking the photograph. Camden Town, London, UK (October 2013)

Tags: #leadership #startup #entrepreneur #computing #mentalhealth #suicide #depression

This is a story of unintended consequences: opportunities and serendipity...

The National Health Service is a wonderful thing. Universal healthcare, including free dentistry and glasses for children and vulnerable members of society. I benefitted from this, but not in the way that might seem most immediately obvious, from the picture of a bespectacled little version of myself, above.

My parents were kind enough to not only care deeply about my eyesight - which was tested at a very young age - but also to impress upon me the importance of having 'adult' mannerisms: remembering my P's and Q's ("please" and "thank you" for anybody not brought up in the Victorian-era), thanking my host for letting me stay, complimenting the chef on meals, and other forgotten social protocols from previous generations.

The combination of a 'bookish' appearance, precicely enunciated diction and good manners, plus a whole repertoire of "party tricks" could be guaranteed to have adults coo-ing and clucking over a "lovely polite little boy". This was borne out of nothing more than any son or daughter's natural desire to please their parents.

I went to the local state school, in Jericho, Oxford, an area which was rapidly being gentrified by middle-class educated families who had discovered that the rental and house prices were excellent value, compared to the rest of central Oxford. This was on account of a stigma of living in "working-class terraced houses" near the canal and derelict, decaying industrial infrastructure of the City.

In 1930's Oxford, Jericho would have busled with coal carts, bringing up sackloads from the canal to heat the large, draughty houses of North Oxford, and the pall of coal smoke from Lucy's Iron Works would have hung close to the water, and through the comparatively narrow terraces, versus the grand wide boulevards of St. Giles and Broad Street.

Being 'right-on' liberals and socialists from humble backgrounds meant these families did not have the means to pay for expensive housing and private school fees. So it was, I ended up going to school with the sons & daughters of heart surgeons, Members of Parliament, bankers, lawyers, accountants and of course, academics, who achieved their place in the world by hard work, not by nepotism.

Amongst my primary school friends, Danny's Grandad, had been instrumental in bringing universal healthcare to the people of Britain, and in so doing, had 'cursed' me with the glasses, which I didn't appreciate the value of at the time.

When playing at the house of another friend, Joe, we were allowed to play on his Dad's Apple Macintosh Plus. Joe's Dad, Paul, is a famous Zoologist who used the Mac to author papers with the likes of Richard Dawkins. Joe's mum, Anna, was a Systems Analyst, and my career aspiration - to drive a coal lorry - was inadvertantly redirected into the world of computing from this point, circa 1986 (age 6).

I can remember those first experiences with a WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse & Pointer) as so intuitive, so natural. It was joyful. Bell Labs invented the transistor, which gave us the modern computer, rather than the collossal rooms of valves that went before. Probably equally important is the work of Xerox in inventing the mouse, and finally Apple, for making a packaged instrument that can be operated by a 6-year-old. "It just works" really is as true today as it was back then.

Sometimes - in fact most of the time - seeing is believing. But this sometimes isn't enough. We also need the pretty packaging. Our computers need to have a rainbow-coloured piece of half-eaten fruit on them. Our nerds need to have a pair of spectacles and talk like they've swallowed a dictionary.

No, I am not comparing myself to Steve Jobs. My career is only just getting interesting. Plus I don't wear enough black.

Tags: #parents #oxford #childhood #apple #computing

This is a story of personal development, mistakes and unanswerable questions...

I wrote something on the platform of King's Cross, doing the minimum necessary research, all from my smartphone. It wasn't me being smart, or my phone, but the programmers, engineers, physicists, philosophers and authors of all the content, who selflessly published into the public domain, via the Internet, which enabled me to do this.

Of course, there had to be a seed too. That seed was Oxford, and the academic sons & daughters who attended state comprehensive during my childhood, including Ben Werdmüller (CEO of Known, where you are reading this post) who taught me how to program a computer and not just use it for consuming video games. Technology then became both my means of consumption for literature (e.g. Cornell University's ArXiv library) but also low-fi tech, such as the Microfiche film I used to view the first photographs of the Middle East, at St Anthony's College, Oxford Univesity.

Ben's father, Oscar, was at St. Anthony's, with my mother, Gillian. This connection has serendipitously given me a career, a love of photography and an appreciation for the physical books, photographs and human relationships, which can be obfuscated by computer screens and Microfiche viewers. Oscar & Ben also inspired in me a love of sport and teamwork, which is only coming to the fore in the 36th year of my life. Debbie, Ben & Hannah inspired in me a love of writing, drawing and creativity that would normally have been stifiled by my move into a technical industry.

The Werdmüller/Monas family's book of drawings by the children - Ben & Hannah - was one of the most precious objects I have ever had the priviledge of handling. Now my own mum looks after priceless manuscripts and first editions of every book ever printed, for the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. These connections are easy to overlook, if you hadn't lived 36 years in my shoes, which is understandable. We all have our own outlook. We are all independent and unique observers in the Universe.

Thanks to a great piece of writing by Ben, it dawned on me that what I do with my 'head start' in computing is often indistinguishable from magic for the vast majority of people, who are playing catch up. Ego and humility always duke it out in my brain, depending on whether I consider my own unique experiences and opportunities, or whether I compare myself to an 'average' set of experiences and opportunities.

So are ordinary people able to stay abreast of developments in theories pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality? Can a kid from a state comprehensive school read and understand the literature that is published in books and academic papers? The jury's out, but I can highly recommend J S Bell's Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics for anybody who would like to read about the probability of a Physics PhD's socks being of different colours.

In the interests of my own reputation... I don't think I've 'solved' or 'discovered' anything. Just a curious mind.

Nick Grant repeating the classic "Quantum Eraser" interferometry experiment with a laser and polarising filter, at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK (July 2011)

Tags: #physics #parents #oxford #childhood