- …aim to grow and sell the business to a multi billion pound company >
I made a risky decision to invest every penny Rocket Science has generated for the past two years, into i-snapshot. Last year we also brought in a quarter of a million from outside investment and I’m in the middle of another funding project for another million with NStar.
Rocket Science was always going to have a much more gentle growth and had a much lower definable peak size than i-snapshot. Rocket Science was never going to be a global player, because in the data world there’s no such thing as a global player. It tends to be regional or national type businesses.
There are no competitors for i-snapshot, but in the parallel space I am taking on Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel, Sage, and salesforce.com, all capitalised at over £6bn. And then there’s me.
There’s only one thing I can do, and that’s to get i-snapshot to a point for exit because otherwise I won’t survive. But that’s ok, I understand that and that’s the game. But equally, every decision I make about the business is based on, dare I say it, on what ‘Bill Gates’ would think.
Somebody’s going to come along and look at the business and hopefully buy it. So it has to be structured in such a way that allows them to easily buy it at a maximum value for me and my shareholders.
It’s not the value on the cheque, it’s the fact that the team and I have built something that other people think has a value. I’d like it to be big cheque, but if I can build a business that Microsoft or Oracle or Sage are tempted enough to put their hands in their pockets for, then that’s a reward in itself. That says that me and my team from Middlesbrough, of all the places in the world, have built something that a muti- billion pound business believe is worth something.
Alan Timothyi-snapshot
