An entrepreneur's journey
A life in business
I started in computer games in 1982, when the British games industry was being invented by people who were often barely out of school. There were no established career paths and very few rules. You made something interesting, persuaded people to buy it and tried to survive long enough to make the next thing. It was an excellent business education.
My company, CRL, became part of that first wave of British software publishers. We published games including Tau Ceti, Academy and The Rocky Horror Show, bringing a gloriously eccentric cultural phenomenon onto home computers. We also pushed into horror. Our Dracula became the first computer game classified by the British film censor; Jack the Ripper subsequently received an 18 certificate. Games were growing up, sometimes noisily.
I was interested in what computers might become, and that took me beyond selling games in boxes. With On-line, we helped pioneer commercial multiplayer gaming, bringing players together through telephone lines and modems years before most people had encountered the internet. Our activities included Federation II, MUD II and Air Warrior. The technology was primitive. The possibilities were enormous.
Federation II, created by Alan Lenton, was especially interesting: a shared universe built around interstellar trade, ambition and social interaction. Players could build businesses and relationships inside an economy that continued beyond an individual session. It belonged to the pioneering generation of online worlds that helped establish the foundations of massively multiplayer online gaming. We were discovering how compelling a computer game became when the other people were real.
Then came multimedia. We were early developers of interactive CD products, starting with Commodore’s CDTV, with our titles among its first releases. Suddenly there was room for speech, music, animation and moving pictures. We explored what you could do with that freedom through titles including The Hound of the Baskervilles, Psycho Killer and The Town with No Name. It was another frontier, complete with the usual arrows.
That work led into The Lawnmower Man and, later, The Interactive Rocky Horror Show. My working life involved programmers, artists, musicians, film footage and the persistent challenge of getting ambitious ideas to run on machines that were never quite powerful enough. Looking back, it was preparation for almost every technology business that followed. The hardware improves; the ambitions expand to fill it.
The internet then opened up financial information. I founded ADVFN and spent more than two decades helping build it into a leading international financial website. Private investors could finally access information and communities that had previously been difficult or expensive to reach. Building that business through booms, crashes and changing technology gave me a practical education in markets alongside my own investing.
Writing developed alongside the businesses. I wrote a stock-market column for Wired, which called me a “Market Maven” and included me in its Brains Trust. I have now retired from Forbes after 25 years as a senior contributor. Across those years I covered technology, shares, commodities, cryptocurrencies and the recurring human habit of believing that this boom must be different.
There were awards along the way: Journalist of the Year for Business Market Commentary at the 2018 State Street UK Institutional Press Awards, a silver Tabbie Award for my Engineering & Technology column, and two PPA Columnist of the Year shortlists. I also wrote investment books and thrillers, including 101 Ways to Pick Stock Market Winners and The Armageddon Trade No1s on Amazon in their segments.
Today, that experience feeds into aNEWfn.com, my new platform for private investors. It provides free real-time UK share prices, free Level 2 order-book information, charts and portfolio tools. I use markets myself, so I deeply care about useful information, speed and being able to see what is happening. There is still plenty to improve in the tools available to ordinary investors.
Silex World takes my business life into the physical materials behind modern technology. Working with Professor Animesh Jha and the University of Leeds, we are developing and commercialising processes for recovering and recycling rare earths. These materials are essential to powerful magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, electronics and industrial machinery. Recovering them efficiently is a substantial technical and commercial opportunity.
The ambition is to help build more independent, sustainable supplies of critical materials, turning valuable waste into useful resources. It brings together science, industry, geopolitics and entrepreneurship. I find that combination irresistible. Meanwhile, through YouTube and Substack, I continue sharing ideas about markets, businesses and whatever looks likely to change the world next.
Forty-four years after those first computer games, I still enjoy starting things. Experience gives you a better map of the pitfalls. Curiosity gives you a reason to keep going.