Work
A short history of the companies and roles I’ve been lucky to be part of.
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Staycity Group
Responsible for technology vision and strategy across the group, and for the full technology stack — IT, web and mobile apps, data warehouse and BI, security, AI, third-party development, and the IT team, vendors and system integrators.
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Homestay.com
Co-founded the global homestay marketplace with Tom Kennedy (Hostelworld) and Debbie Flynn after my previous startup, NiftySchool, was acquired. Built the product, engineering, data, and multi-currency payments infrastructure from day one, and grew the team to ~30. Stepped up as Managing Director in 2017 to restructure the company and lead it from monthly losses to break-even through efficiency, cost, and conversion work.
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4niches Ltd — NiftySchool.com
Founded 4niches to build NiftySchool.com, a SaaS platform for language schools. Grew it from a London pilot to 100+ schools across three continents; acquired by Homestay Technologies in May 2012 and now part of the Homestay group.
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Mobile Interactive Group
Joined as a senior Ruby on Rails developer on large-scale mobile platforms (content distribution, an O2 UK loyalty platform processing 500k+ top-ups/day), then moved into product to define and run an SMS content distribution platform and a multi-channel marketing platform used by O2, Vodafone, Three, Sky, Virgin Media and ITV — together delivering 10M+ messages/month.
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SeeSaw srl
My first entrepreneurial venture. Co-founded and ran a boutique software consultancy serving small and medium-sized customers across Italy, with projects ranging from websites and web apps to content management systems and back-end admin tools. Notable engagements included work for the Italian government (impresa.gov.it) and Q8 Petroleum. As part of SeeSaw I also ran the first commercial Ruby on Rails courses in Italy. Tech stack: Ruby on Rails, Java (JSP, JSF, Portals), Spring Framework, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, EJBs.
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Earlier roles
Software developer / analyst roles at Archeometra (2004–2006) and Supernet S.p.A. (2000–2003), working across Java/J2EE, Liferay portals, and Ruby on Rails.