What was your first job?
My first job out of school was as an assistant pastry chef. I only lasted around six months, but I was working at the back of a pastry shop rolling croissants.
How did you end up in the IT industry?
The IT industry is something I loved my whole life. I’ve been repairing computers since I was little.
How did you progress to where you are today?
I set-up two companies – one called PC Anytime, and the other called Apple Anytime – in the late 1990s. They were both value-added resellers for Apple and PC products. They did very well, and I sold them both off, which helped me to fund Tegatech.
Why did you decide that Tegatech would specialise in ultramobile PCs (UMPCs)?
I’m a believer that specialists will always be able to ride through market volatility better than jack-ofall- trades. So what we’ve done is created a niche around mobile computing and focused on that exclusively, because we felt mobility was going to be a bigger focus than desktop computing would be.
I remember my passion for the business started from meeting my first tablet PC in 2002, and from that point onwards I just fell in love with mobile computing, pen input and touchscreens – what we call human interface computing – which was fairly ahead of its time back then. I knew the market would catch up at some point, and it seems to be this year it’s starting to do that.
