Blogging again after a long hiatus

It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog. Roughly 10% of the world’s population wasn’t even alive yet when I last posted - that’s sobering!

I was in my late thirties, now my mid-forties. My kids were just approaching their teens - I now have two adult children. Gower Street was a real adventure, as expected - we 5x’ed the team, iterated the product and weathered the devastating impact COVID-19 had on the global film industry.

I’m now four years into co-founding and building Cherrypick with TFC. (It is a fantastic meal-led shopping assistant to help people eat better with zero effort - you should try it!) Founding a venture capital backed company myself has been a huge learning experience. I have learned much about just-enough technology, consumer startups, company culture, management, raising money and how venture capital actually works.

Setting up my user account on BlueSky reminded me about this blog, and awakened a latent desire to write again. I’d love to say more about the new tech we have been building for Cherrypick, and write more about the incredible wave of AI innovation that’s crashed through our industry in the last few years.

I have also been running technology organisations for 25 years now, and scaled a few tech teams - my experience could be useful to first time CTOs, tech startup founrders, and lead developers taking their first steps into management.

I used some of the time during COVID writing on a now-defunct blog called Delivery Doubled, aimed at helping agile teams ship faster. Some of that content made it to Twitter, and some more will end up here. I could have just started again, but it’s quite nice to look back over old posts and to see the journey. It has been long, varied and meandering, and I have learned so much from everything I have worked on and everyone I have met so far.

Here’s to the next chapter.