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