Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Rob is the lead technologist and blockchain DLT at Digital Catapult A Trained medical doctor, Robert worked in the NHS for 6-years. He really enjoyed the role but always had a desire to ‘invent stuff’. So he went back to university to study a degree that would allow him to do that. Robert first took an interest in blockchain whilst doing his Ph.D and the bitcoin phenomenon exploded in 2012. He knew then Bitcoin was something he needed to be part of. In that time he also co-founded the research center for cryptocurrency research & engineering at Imperial College. After this Rob moved out of the research world and into Digital Catapult so he could make a broader economic impact on society. Rob’s driving force is discussing and understanding where blockchain technology is heading and where can it be applied to make a real impact.

Greg is the founder and CEO at Octopus Energy After a short sojourn in the video game industry when he finished his GCSE’s Greg returned to university to do a degree in Economics. He landed his first professional role in the marketing department at Proctor & Gamble. When Greg started at P&G the concept of technology and marketing being closely entwined was very alien. But with the advent of the consumer-facing internet that all changed and the two disciplines began gelling together. Greg seized on the developing digital marketing industry by creating a product we’d now identify as a cloud-based Saas CRM. He was one of the first individuals in the world to produce a type of technology like this. The product was reasonably successful and let Greg sold it for a tidy profit. Selling this product gave Greg enough capital to build a big business in an area that really matters. Not long after he founded Octopus Energy. He started Octopus Energy because he is passionate about bringing fairer practices and better value to the people of Britain.

Juan is the VP of Engineering at Splice. Moving to America in 2007 Juan initially worked as a chef after studying culinary arts. After the financial crisis of 2008, he found himself moving away from cheffing and started building websites for people. He initially learned his computer skills from building myspace pages for his friend's bands. It wasn’t long until Juan moved into the startup scene in US. He moved from Florida to New York and began his role at Splice.

Stephen is the Director of Product at OLX Group A lot of Stephen’s background is in product management. He started of his career as a software engineer and expected to do that for his entire career. But then, one Saturday, he was awoken by a support call where some big SMS system was down and he had to figure out how to fix it. He realised he enjoyed life too much to keep sacrificing his Saturdays like that so he started exploring opportunities. He was looking for a role where he can still build things but not be on call all the time. This is how he discovered product management. From this point on Stephen knew he’d found his calling. He spent time working with a very large eCommerce retailer in South Africa. From there he moved to a big global internet company where he worked in a role that involved project managing an agritech startup. After this, he fell in love with online classifieds. And moved to OLX where he’s spent the past 6 years doing a variety of exotic things.

Julian is the CEO at Made By Many An award-winning digital publisher, Julian has lead transformation and innovation within big brands including Sky News and ITV. He has 20 years of editorial experience, expertise in TV, video & digital media production, with a focus on the numbers to drive revenue and profit, and the leadership skills to develop high-performing teams. He is currently helping Made By Many through the next chapter of their growth story.

Mattia is the head of machine learning & quantum algorithms at Cambridge Quantum Computing. Mattia is an enthusiastic research lead in the areas of Machine Learning and Quantum Computing. In his classical computing activity, he applies deep learning to algorithmic trading and financial time-series forecasting. With my team, he has implemented many intra-day trading strategies in diverse financial markets. During Mattia’s studies towards his PhD in computational Physics, he focussed on the first-principles of electronic transport simulations for energy harvesting, conversion, and conservation. During this journey, he gained significant experience in Python, Bash, fortran2003 and parallel computation. Mattia developed from scratch an HPC research software that runs on distributed memory clusters (MPI) and has been tested to scale on up to 1000s cores on UK national facility ARCHER.

Tom is the co-founder at Tickr Tom began his career in 2011 in Barclay’s graduate scheme. He spent several years working in their investment division working in both the UK and Hong Kong. In 2014 joined a US investment management firm called Wellington Management where he spent the next 5-years. It was in this role that Tom started working in impact investment. This investing strategy involves investing in companies that are solving problems that are scaleable and the first to market. Every year Tom and his team managed to beat the markets by investing in companies solving real-world problems. During this time Tom and his co-founder started to realise there was no way to invest their money, in the same way, they were doing at work. So in 2016 Tickr was born.

Althea is a senior data professional and Chief Data Officer. A passionate advocate of the value of data, Althea has spent the past 20 years working as a data management professional. She is currently a contract CDO and her hands-on knowledge includes data strategy, information management, big data, data governance & data quality. She is currently working in Amsterdam where she is leading and managing the global data governance services for an international alcohol brand. Her mandate is to optimize the current data management practice and enable reliable analytics & reporting practices within the business.

Nick is the Head of IT at Bossa Studios Originally a graphic artist Nick specialised in art with a computer specialisation. At university, he studied 3D graphics and 3D art. When Nick started working he found his industry was full of artists but not many people who were technically minded. So Nick found himself slowly gravitating to the more technical side of his role. Nick started in tech support and began slowly specialising in networking and bounced back and forth between this and some web graphics work. Eventually, Nick got offered a job at a very small ISB he became the systems administrator there and learned how to administer servers that he had a natural affinity for. Nick took several jobs as a system administrator all over the world before ending up in the UK where he’s working now.

Steve is the Technical Director at Mashbo Steve caught the coding bug whilst doing his A-levels and he moved away from a career as a pilot to pursue programming. He did a Computer Science degree at the University of Liverpool and has worked and lived in the city he grew up in ever since. In 2011 Steve and two colleagues founded Mashbo. They set up their own company so they could create a positive, forward-thinking company culture they’ve always wanted at work. Mashbo was originally conceived as a piece of software that allowed you to donate to a chosen charity when you bought products online. In order to fund this idea, they began developing websites for clients. This quickly became more profitable than their original idea and they moved in web design.