Juicy Fridays: Alex van Someren

Charonite regularly organises special Friday afternoons for all of the development team with presentations and tutorials on interesting topics, which we call Juicy Fridays. The topics are generally chosen using a mixture of an internal voting based system (anyone can nominate a topic for Juicy Friday) and past topics have included search engine ranking methods, MVC frameworks, semantic web technologies, Natural Language Processing (NLP), image processing and so on.

Our distinguished guest for July 2010 Juicy Friday was Alex van Someren, who is a dealmaker for the Global Entrepreneur Programme by the UK Trade and Investment and a successful serial entrepreneur. Alex gave a very inspiring presentation on his own journey in IT and investments, taking good technical ideas, transforming them into products and then helping raise VC funding and finally taking the company public via an IPO.

Alex van Someren speaking at our Juicy Friday event

Alex started off his career in IT with Acorn Computers in the 1980s, where he was extensively involved in the BBC Microcomputer project. He subsequently co-founded ANT Ltd in 1990 to produce networking products, including Web Browser software licensed to Oracle.  ANT plc was listed on the London AIM market (AIM:NCH) in 2005 and is now positioned in the embedded software market for IPTV.

In 1996 Alex co-founded nCipher with venture capital backing to develop internet security products using advanced cryptography. The company became a world leader in IT security, counting major banks, finance companies and governments among its customers. He subsequently raised a total of £14 million in venture capital funding before he led the company to a listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 (LSE:NCH) at a £350 million valuation. nCipher plc was sold to Thales SA in 2008. Alex is the current Chairman of the Prince’s Trust in Cambridgeshire and a Governor of King’s College School, Cambridge.