Okay as I promised, here's my introduction. I'm Brendan Quinn, a 35 year old geek sort of trying to become a business guy. I spent my first 28 years or so in Australia and have been living in London since 2002. I hope that doesn't immediately disqualify me from Silicon Beach membership...
Going way back as people seem to do in these intros, I started in tech with the obligatory Vic 20 / C64 / Amiga route, from the age of 8 or so I was writing BASIC programs on the Vic 20 as there wasn't much else you could do at the time! My interest in computers really blossomed when I started at high school (Mazenod College in Mulgrave, Vic) where we had a network of BBC Micros. You could write assembly code on them really easily, and do fun things like send chunks of random data to another machine's sound buffer, which kind of surprised the kid doing his word processing assignment a few machines down in the lab. Our teacher let us come in at lunchtimes, after school etc so I built up a good background in programming/hacking and some good friends -- for example I built a little electronic mail program on our network in 1988. It wasn't until I read about the "10,000 hours theory" in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" that i realised the value of this experience! I was very lucky to go to uni at an amazing time -- I was doing a Comp Sci honours degree at Monash (taught by some greats like Damian Conway, now a legend in the Perl scene) when the web came out, so i already had an understanding of the protocols behind FTP, TCP, NNTP etc before HTTP was invented. And having access to Sun and SGI machines we were able to use the very first browsers in 1993 and 1994. So I knew that the web was the place to be. After part-time jobs at an ISP I worked for Sofcom Internet Publishers as a developer from 1996 to 1998. But I missed out on the crazy days of their ASX listing because I went to work at Fairfax, becoming their "Online Editorial Technology Manager", ie the boss of the webmasters for the Age, SMH and AFR. We implemented a new content management system, grew the editorial tech team to 12 people, built the first WAP news site in Australia and created some of the first RSS feeds, and ended up running the tech side of the award-winning olympics.smh.com.au, which was the only site to stay up throughout the Sydney 2000 games (the official olympics.org and the news.com.au site both fell over on day one and ours stayed up... I'm pretty proud of that ;-) I worked with some amazing people and built up my frequent flyer points, having a team split between Sydney and Melbourne. After that I set up a one-man consultancy, Clueful Consulting Pty Ltd (www.clueful.com.au) doing specialist work around web content management systems, syndication and metadata, which was fun for a year but in early 2002 when I got a call from a Fairfax colleague who had gone to work for the BBC, the lure proved too great and within two months I was living and working in London. I'm still at the BBC (after more than seven years!!) but I've moved around a bit, doing metadata, content management, digital infrastructure and large-scale web architecture for what is one of the world's biggest web sites. I've worked with people like Tim Berners- Lee and the W3C, the Apache crew, most of the big tech companies you can think of, and spoken at conferences all over the world. Fun times. In the meantime I've just completed an Executive (ie part-time) MBA at London Business School through which I got a taste for startups, entrepreneurship and innovation. I was lucky enough to go on exchange for a term to UC Berkeley, living the dream in Silicon Valley for the last half of 2008. I'm just about to start a new role at the Beeb looking at commercialising the technology coming out of our Research & Development unit, which will give me a great taste for how the venture capital industry works, how to get new businesses started and build a network of contacts in London and hopefully around the world. On the side I've been looking into some startup ideas, and my current plaything is www.mycharitypie.com, a new way of donating to charities through direct debit. It works in prototype form but I haven't formed a company, worked out the payment side of things etc. I started the project through www.launch48.com, started by fellow Aussie expat Ian Broom with his friend Adil Mohammed, nice blokes. Eventually I suppose I'll end up back in Australia so I want to keep in touch with the startup scene, hence why I've been lurking on this list. Hopefully I can provide a bridge between the Australian and European startup community, and help make connections where I can. Phew! That's a big intro, sorry to bore you all :-) Looking forward to some interesting discussions! Brendan. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach Australia mailing list. Discussions guidelines: http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/browse_thread/thread/bc43d028e122852a No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself: http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/browse_thread/thread/99938a0fbc691eeb To post to this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
