About

I'm an entrepreneur based primarily in Palo Alto, California, and sometimes in London, UK and Hong Kong, China. I grew up Abingdon, a market town near Oxford in the UK, attended Abingdon School, the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham (Cranfield University) and started my first start-up – an ARM systems consulting business – along with Mark Brinicombe right after I graduated.

Mark and I have worked together for my entire working career. Most recently, along with Jim Dawson we founded Yellowbrick Data, a Data Warehousing startup, in 2014. We started seriously building our product in 2015 during which time I had no ambition to be the CEO of anything: It was my dream job, days spent programming, architecting and coding, punctuated with sales calls to prospects and customers. However I had to mature with the company and have since grown as a respected leader, learned enough to be dangerous about far more business disciplines, and am wholly responsible for helping all of us at Yellowbrick continue on our amazing growth trajectory – which isn't without bumps, a subject I will be writing more about here.

During these few years at Yellowbrick, my friends and hobbies are what have keept me sane. It's incredibly hard to devote any time to hobbies in a startup, perhaps a few hours a month at the most. Some hobby time still involves hacking little bits of code for fun, but mostly I try to switch off and do things that are less stressful and involve using the other parts of the brain: I love woodworking (especially joinery with hand tools), all things around food – preparing it, cooking it and eating it, and all things related to alcoholic beverages. I adore travel and seeing most parts of world as locals see them. I particularly love Asia and Europe, and have a bit of a knack for languages, having learned Latin, French, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese as well as the prerequisite C++, Java, JavaScript and whatnot. I've also spent a great deal of time learning most construction trades while rebuilding and renovating a 1939 bungalow designed by local architect Charles K. Sumner in Palo Alto, California.

I don't know if the things that interest me will be particularly interesting to anyone else, but on the off chance that they are, hopefully some insights into startup building, what goes wrong, what goes right, and some of my passions will be of use! Feel free to shoot me a note anytime at neil@yellowbrick.com.