From the UK to Silicon Valley and back again
GLOBALISATION throws up some interesting associations. The western world’s need to stay awake supports the coffee industries of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa; the desires of Japanese, Indians and Chinese consumers to imbibe is helping the UK’s Scotch whisky industry flourish. No less interesting is the case of WANdisco – a tech company that distributes its product to every conceivable place (including the North Pole) – but splits its offices between Silicon Valley and Sheffield.
David Richards left the UK for Silicon Valley 13 years ago. A veteran of several successful startup companies, it was at a drinks party in Silicon Valley that he met Yeturu Aahlad, now chief scientist and inventor at WANdisco. Aahlad approached Richards claiming to have a great idea for a piece of technology that he had been working on for 5 years: “It turned out he was one of the top people in his field in the world, previously architect for distributive computing at Sun Microsystems.” Aahlad’s 20 page proof formed the algorithm around which the company was built.
WANdisco was founded in 2001, although Richards decided three years ago to expand back home in Sheffield, where he currently employs 40 people. The functions of the business are now split between sales and marketing in the US and software engineering and support in Sheffield. “These are not call centre jobs,” says Richards, “they are high-end technology jobs. I don’t want any of these people to leave, but if they did, every single one of them would be at the top of their field.”
It isn’t straightforward explaining what WANdisco – an acronym for “wide area network distributed computing” – does exactly. But Richards does a pretty good job: “One of the problems with software development is that if you have a central sever, say in the United States, but engineers in India, China and the UK, it can take days to download all the source code.” Through “active-active replication over a wide area network” exact copies of source can be worked on at the same time anywhere in the world. Richards has accrued many of the Fortune 1,000 companies – Hewlett Packard, Motorola and Honda, for example – as customers.
Previously, as president and chief executive of Insevo, he raised venture capital from 3i. But he soon found the relationship too restrictive. He went on to form Librados (meaning free men – free, that is, from private equity). Librados, and now WANdisco, were able to avoid private equity, he says, by leading sales through open source software. WANdisco are the major corporate sponsor of Subversion: “Half of all the world’s software is developed and stored inside Subversion.” WANdisco profits from the extra tools and services companies add to this.
The next step is an initial public offering (IPO) on the UK’s Aim market on 30 April: “I think if you’ve got a growth story like ours – which is 50 per cent growth last year alone – I feel pretty confident.” Given that every WANdisco employee has either stock or options in the company, perhaps a few more entrepreneurs of his quality will choose to go it alone. Silicon Sheffield certainly has a nice ring to it.
CV | DAVID RICHARDS
Number of staff: 70
Age: 41
Born: Sheffield
Lives: San Francisco Bay Area
Studied: University of Huddersfield
Drinking: Micro-brew beer when in the UK and Californian wine at home in the US
Reading: The Penguin History of the World (New Year’s resolution to finish it this time) and Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
Talents: Startups, entrepreneurship, motivating people to achieve the improbable and (hopefully) being a half-decent husband and father.
Favourite business book: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Motto: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” (Einstein)
First ambition: To play cricket for Yorkshire and England