Springboard

A lot’s been happening at Red Gate recently, including another acquisition, an innovative and successful hiring campaign as well as general growth of the business.

Although Springboard was very successful, we had to make the difficult decision to postpone this year’s programme.  In order to run it well, it demands a lot of time from Red Gate’s founders, who look like they will be more constrained later in the year.

We’d like to thank everyone for their support so far.  The speakers and mentors have been very understanding and we look forward to next time!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

A new kind of start-up accelerator

Springboard is a free startup programme in Cambridge that’ll turn your ideas into real products. You’ll get advice from founders of successful software companies and the resources to eat, live and work for at least 3 months

And all you need up front is the idea. To find out more, click here

Last year we pulled together a great pool of speakers for the programme. The Springboard teams learned a lot from their experiences but, as promised, had to fight for their share of the pizza and beer.  Here’s  a summary of the people who took the time to help out our teams.

Tim Lister

Tim is a Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc., based in the New York office. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing and has over 30 years of professional software development experience. Before the formation of the Atlantic Systems Guild, he worked at Yourdon Inc. from 1975 to 1983 where he was an Executive Vice President and Fellow, in charge of all instructor/consultants, the technical content of all courses, and the quality of all consultations.

Alex van Someren

Alex van Someren became involved with local firm Acorn Computer as a young teenager. He left school at 17 to join the company, working on the prototype BBC before starting his own consulting firm.  He went on to co-found ANT Limited in 1990 to produce networking products – ANT plc was listed on the London AIM market in 2005 and is now positioned in the embedded software market for IPTV.  From 1996 Alex was CEO of nCipher which he co-founded with his brother to develop internet security products. They raised a total of £14m ($28m) in venture capital investments between 1996 and 2000; nCipher plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2000, raising a further £108m ($216m) at IPO. Alex expanded the company by making four acquisitions before recruiting his successor and exiting the business in December 2007. The company was sold to Thales SA in October 2008.

Stephen Allot

Stephen worked at Micromuse where at various times he was President, CFO and a main board director.  While there he increased the company’s annual revenue from £1m to £140m and the number of employees grew from 50 to 800.  Prior to Micromuse, Stephen worked at McKinsey as a strategy consultant and before this he held positions at Sun Microsystems and Rank Xerox.

Paul Kenny

Paul is one of the UK’s top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian Newspaper and tens of others. Paul has developed a portfolio of nearly 100 sales, management and personal development courses. He won a national training award for his work with The Guardian.

Joel Spolsky

Joel started his career at Microsoft and became co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software.  As well as his day job, Joel writes about software development and at joelonsoftware.com and also co-founded StackOverflow.com

Ryan Carson

Ryan is passionate about connecting and encouraging people.  That’s why he co-founded Carsonified, a company in the UK that runs events for the web community. Ryan also loves, coffee and movies.

Peldi Guilizzoni

Peldi is founder and CEO of Balsamiq Studios and in just 14 months their flagship product, Mockups, has brought in over $1m in revenue is used by over 9000 customers worldwide.  Prior to founding Balsamiq he was a Senior Software Engineering Lead at Adobe.

Laurence John

Laurence is CEO of the Amadeus & Angels Seed Fund at Amadeus Capital, with £10m under management and up to £10m for co-investment from Amadeus III.   Since joining Laurence has established Amadeus’ seed activity with the Amadeus Mobile Seed Fund and made a number of investments including Enigmatec, Nujira, XMOS and Ambient Industries.

Eric Peacock

Eric is active as a serial entrepreneur having taken his own business Babygro Plc to a full stock exchange listing and others to AIM and Trade Sales. Eric currently chairs a number of businesses across a range of industries and his passion is around the development of leaders and their teams.  Eric believes that his role is to enable people to find their own greatness in the environment in which they work. Companies which he has chaired have been winners of the Best Place To Work, The UK BT Vision Award, The Queen’s Award for Expert Achievement and for Technology.

After taking in hundreds of applications from over the globe we narrowed them down to the top four teams.  They arrived in Cambridge and the last few weeks have been a blur for everyone (hence the really late announcement).  We sorted out their accommodation, space to work and they’ve been making great progress so far.  A brief introduction to each team is below and we’re expecting great things from them.

Overall, we’ve got a great line-up of speakers coming in and were still finalising the last few.  You can see an updated list on the speakers page and we’ll be providing the highlights of each talk here as we go along.  There’s a backlog to get thorugh so check back over the next couple of days to catch up with our last few speakers.

PagerDuty is an alarm dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. The co-founders, Alex, Andrew and Baskar came over from Toronto, Canada.

Good Economics is developing solutions that allow banking providers to capitalise on the demand for personal money management.  Matt and Peter were working in London before coming up to Cambridge for Springboard.

Meta Alternative is a Cambridge-based startup that specialises in the fields of Microsoft .NET optimisation and static code analysis. Lyudmila and Vitaly were on our doorstep and had the shortest journey to the office.

TidePowerd is building tools to help developers take advantage of the enormous speedups available from GPGPU computing. Jack and Nick are both recent University graduates and made the trip over from Alabama, USA.

You can read a little more about each of the teams on the Start-ups page.