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

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.

Paolo is the Software Development Manager at Volume.ai A software developer with 10+ years of experience, Paolo started learning computer science in his native Italy. Paolo has a master's degree in computer vision and artificial intelligence. Five years ago Paolo decided he wanted a new adventure and challenge and moved to the UK and he started working for Volume. When he started the company was mainly a digital agency. But when Paolo started it was already changing to a more AI-focused development company. Paolo was part of this transition. They moved from a marketing agency to a software development company. Currently, they already have some products on the market and they mainly focus on machine learning and AI for conversational platforms.

Nimrod is the Business Intelligence Lead at Hermes Investment Management Starting his BI career a decade ago, Nimrod began working in the space as a consultant. He quickly progressed to a lead consultant then team leader. After a few years working in a consultancy, he moved to Hermes where he now works with their in-house BI team. With a BA in Philosophy and Mass Media, Nimrod pivoted into data and has been responsible for overseeing the making of greenfield data warehouses around ESG data.

Hayley is the Business Intelligence Manager at Virgin Atlantic Airlines. Hayley’s path into business intelligence is an unconventional one. She originally studied theology in Las Vegas and initially wanted to be a pastor in the US. Her first job out of university was in a bank. She worked in Finance for a while before getting recruited by a stockbroker and moved into investment management for a decade. During this time she first encountered big data began working closely with datasets and business intelligence. 3-years ago she decided she wanted a change and moved to London. She stayed in data and has worked in everything from fashion to Starbucks and she’s now at Virgin Atlantic.

Mhairi Davidson is the delivery Team Lead at CDL Software After leaving universtiy Mhairi was unsure what she wanted to do. She knew she wanted to earn some money so decided to pursue a career in recruitment. After applying for a few positions she ended up working in the oil and gas market in Aberdeen. After this, she worked in the public sector and then for a sports nutrition company. After a few years in Recruitment, Mhairi decided it wasn’t for her anymore and she decided to move into another industry and went to work with her dad in construction. This industry proved not to be as fast-paced as Mhairi had hoped and Brexit affected the cost of materials so much so that Mhairi wanted something more exciting out of a career. She then moved to a small tech company working in Manchester city center as a salesperson. During her time there she moved into a Head of People position. There was no internal recruitment department so she set that up for them. After doing this the company had a vacant open on the

Edson is the Head of Engineering at Lloyd’s Banking Group. Arriving in the UK in 2004 Edson found employment within a fortnight working for a small building sub-contractor in the Bolton area. This role required him to develop their information management systems and upgrading their day to day operations. After a few years, he moved to a company called Amptech which has now been acquired by Trimble. He spent 7 years at Trimble before moving to Findel Education as their Head of Web Development and was promoted to Head of Software Engineering. He has recently moved to Lloyd’s Banking Group.

Mike is the Head of Data & Analytics at the Bodyshop. Mike's interest in data started when he began studying economics at A levels. It was the first time he’d seen a subject that married maths with real-world problems and issues. It was his first taste of using data to make business recommendations. Mike carried on learning economics right through to a Master’s degree. After a brief foray into investment banking, Mike went to work at a company called Game Theory. This company taught Mike the fundamentals of data analytics. After a while at Game Theory Mike moved into the retail sector to work at Debenhams. He did this to get some more hands-on data experience. He then went to the Post Office and got some first-hand experience dealing with bureaucracy and red tape. Then went to The Guardian news and media, then Aimia and now he works as the Head of Data & Analytics at The Bodyshop.

Purnima is the Operations & People Director at Sparta Global When Purnima started her career in technology there was no clear career path set out for her. With a degree and masters in economics, Purnima ended up in technology almost by accident. Her IT career started when she joined a company called Sun Systems. Whilst at this company Purnima got a really good understanding and appreciation of technology. Although she isn’t technical herelf Purnima began to understand a lot of the jargon being used in the business. She realised that if you want to work in an innovative sector you need to work in IT. It was a sector where you could be creative as well as innovative. After working at Sun Systems she spent 16 years working in an IT consultancy before moving to Sparta Global.

Jay is the CTO at Wunderman Thompson Mobile Originally from the east coast, Jay moved to Denver to do more snowboarding. He worked various jobs building websites for companies during and after the dot com bubble burst. When the App boom happened Jay moved into mobile development. He joined a company called Double Encore and they helped build mobile apps for social media platforms. As they were early starters in the app sector they became known for creating high-quality apps. Double Encore merged with another company called Excellent Creations to combine clients and stop competition for developers. They were then acquired by Possible and became Possible Mobile. Since then Jay has been leading the engineering department for the past 10 years. They have recently rebranded and are now called Wunderman Thompson Mobile.

Nigel is the CTO at Intelligent Voice. Before his career in tech, Nigel was an IT lawyer (before IT lawyers were a thing). He’s invested in several small software companies in his time and now specialises in voice recognition and related technologies. Intelligent Voice provides market-leading surveillance and monitoring solutions for telephone calls, e-mail, IM, social media, and any text documents. We also have an incredibly fast speech to text engine, capable of processing speech to text at up to 400x real time using Nvidia GPU technology.

Simon is the Chief Data Officer at Rank Group. Recently shortlisted for Data Leader of the year 2019, Simon has had a long and varied career in Data. In his current role at Rank, he is responsible for driving value and insights from data. He’s previously worked at Regus plc where he, working with the operations team, increased profit margins by 64%. Simon has also spent time at Lloyd bank when he was responsible for driving a billion pounds of revenue per annum. In both of these roles, his successes were underpinned by the use of data. When working for Tesco Simon helped fix the data after the company suffered the largest corporate loss in UK history. At Bupa, he fixed the regulating and reporting issues in the insurance part of the business.

Katy is the Managing Director at Socialchain Katy’s spent her career in media and marketing. She was the head of New Media and Marketing at MediaCom north before moving to Socialchain. In this podcast, Andy and Katy talk about the growth of Socialchain, the ups, and downs of agency work and the advantages of podcasting. When she’s not working at Socialchain Katy is busy hosting her own podcast, ‘I shouldn’t say this but…’ (http://bit.ly/katy-podcast).

Malte is the VP of Product at Searchmetrics Malte stumbled into SEO when he was about 15 years old. He’d built his own website and he was surprised to see website traffic from areas he didn’t expect. After investigating he realised his traffic was coming from his SEO efforts. This happy accident led Malte down the career path he’s on today. When Malte went to university he studied Computer Science further augmenting his skills in SEO and web development. After university, he worked in a management consultancy after being a co-founder in an SEO agency he founded at university. He then moved to Searchmetrics where he’s been for the past 4 years.

Mita is a Senior Product Manager at Mindera Starting her career in the construction industry Mita advanced from an entry-level software developer to a development manager. She also spent 18 months in India setting up an offshore team. After a successful career in software, she decided to move into product management. Mita felt she has mastered all things she wanted to as a developer and working on a product from conception, research and through to execution was an exciting proposition for her. Still working in the construction sector, Mita saw her company go through two acquisitions and ultimately get acquired by Oracle. Mita moved companies to Mindera to explore different industries. She wanted to get exposure to lots of different domains and cultures. She has spent the past 6 months running Mindera’s gambling products.