My name is Kevin Dorren, I live in Edinburgh and have had an interesting if not varied career. So here is the run down.

1. I am not a geek but have always liked gadgets and technology. I saved £79.95 + P&P to buy a Sinclair ZX80 which I built with my brother in law Hamish. Problem is my maths ain’t much good. Stopped programming after:
   • 10 Print “hello”
   • 20 Goto 10
2. When I was 16 I tried to persuade Prince’s Trust that the future was in home delivery of Grocery. I wanted a grant to start a business delivering to elderly people and housebound in Edinburgh. I was told - “it will never catch on son - go to University and come back when you are educated and wiser”. OK so I didn’t have a business plan, funding or experience - but I had an idea. Wilshire Farm Foods, Ocado and Tesco seem to do OK out of this.
3. I then studied Hotel Management at Napier University. Met Claire my now wife and still played on computers a lot.
4. First job was working at Wheatsheaf Catering an outside caterer based at Hopetoun House, Edinburgh.
5. Stupidy left this nice secure graduate trainee position to work as a commission only salesperson for an startup energy management company run by Hugh Smeaton.
6. Quite enjoyed selling, when Delcomm was acquired by East Midlands Electricity I stayed on a while but then moved on to work with Hugh again in a document management company importing a client server solution called Keyfile.
7. Through Hugh’s son Calum who was a research associate at Heriot Watt University saw Mosaic a little application for something called the World Wide Web.
8. Scared myself that this was going to be the end of client/server computing.
9. Tried to help Calum and Alan the founders of Orbital Technologies to look for applications.
10. Started the Virtual Inn (www.virtual-inn.co.uk) a hotel booking system for small hotels on the internet. Many people said that wouldn’t catch on either. Now owned by Travelocity.
    
11. Calum and Alan also had a neat FAQ application that we developed into Organik. A web based Q&A system, used for corporates to share tacit knowledge. It’s a long story but raised VC funding, went public on the techmark index of the London Stock Exchange. Experienced a large correction in valuation (.com crash!) and sold the company to Sopheon an AIM listed company. Also lived in California for a few years and met a few well known living legends like Eric Schmidt (Sun, Novell, Google), Chris Shipley, Tony Perkins, Ann Winblad etc etc.
12. Sulked for a while
13. Invested in a few startup companies in Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) and also a diet company Go Lower with my ex lawyer Hannah Sutter…
14. In a circular way decided that the best way to deliver diet is direct to consumer, the programming knowledge comes in handy GOTO LINE 2!!!