Contact
I always enjoy meeting new people and hearing what they are up to.
About Me
Currently I am a co-founder of Kytra. I have also been a software engineer, investor, stock broker, tractor driver, barman.
Kytra
Kytra is an investing assistant app to help self directed investors manage their portfolios and make more informed investment decision.
I am one of the two co-founders, both coding up the react-native mobile app, and strategic co-ordination of the business.
We are currently located in the 70 Wilson Street WeWork labs, doing our first marketing of the app and seeking out our first investors.
This business has been in progress for over a year part time, and full time since November 2019.
To find out more check out our website LINK.
How I got to where I am today?
Stock market investing
From the age of 18 I had an interest in investment. I traded my way through Aberdeen University, and enjoyed doing it so much on graduating with a degree I decided I wanted to work in the stockbroking industry.
Stockbroking
I worked at Killik & Co for 5 years as an advisory stockbroker advising on portfolio construction, basic financial advice (pensions, ISAs, trusts), and recommending trading ideas on stocks, bonds, alternatives, and funds.
Investment Management
I worked at Sarasin & Partners for 4 years as a discretionary investment manager of high net work private client portfolios. It was during this time I recognised the speed of change taking place in the industry due to technological innovation, so I committed to becoming part of the force for change.
General Assembly
I learnt to be a full stack software engineer at General Assemly, learning Node JS, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Angular 1, and Rails. They helped me curate a new CV as a software engineer and land my first software engineering job.
Captain AI
Captain AI was a very steep learning curve, I was introduced to machine learning and micro services. I had a high level of responsibility very early on as one of two back end software engineers. There we took a monolithic rails application to a micro services stack of c. 25 services.
Drover
I had a brief stint at Drover. It clearly had an amazing business model and was growing at a rate of knots, however with my limited work experience I struggled to work with what was a monolithic Rails application of tightly bound spaghetti code. They were making reasonable progress at simplifying it, but I was not patient enough nor felt like I was learning fast enough.
Farmdrop
I made the jump to Farmdrop to gain further experience of transitioning a monolithic Rails application to microservices. It offered the chance to work with setting up Kafka, GraphQL, a Neo4j database and elasticsearch. As a series B company with a large client base, it was another steep learning curve of new technologies and building scalable applications. I had great fun there but unfortunatley it failed to secure a sizeable enough funding round.
Contracting - Soho House
I did a brief stint at Soho House as a contracting software engineer. There I got the businesses back-end ready for Strong Customer Authentication payments.