After a summer holiday job researching film & TV rights in 1999 over a small and slow web: I built a website for indie filmmaking and quit Uni with a friend to run it full time. We had three goals: to learn about filmmaking and the media business by interviewing everyone we could (& publishing it); to distribute or 'netribute' films online; and to sell our startup for millions so we could make our own movies. I was 20, broadband didn't exist — everyone was on dialup, we knew next-to-nothing — and two weeks after we quit Uni, the dotcom bubble burst.
We survived on instant coffee, making documentaries for cable TV and writing more industry books, until £500-a-month 75-hour-weeks hurt too much and I went to join another indie film web startup (which was more successful). I brought out a book on film finance with an expert film lawyer— we sold 11,000 copies and I got to sit signing books in Cannes during the festival, despite never having had a film financed and released.
With a rucksack of regrets and lessons learnt, I now try to work as close to exclusively in the non-profit & charity sector as I can. I bring a design eye to open source projects, working with the three main open source CMSs (Joomla, Wordpress & Drupal) and the best open source CRM — CiviCRM. In my spare time I'm an unread Cli-Fi author with a stack of unmade films.