About Me
I have been an entrepreneur, software engineer, investor, stock broker, tractor driver, barman. Right now I am a co-founder of Kytra.
Stock market investing
My interest in investment was sparked at the age of 18 when I was given a 1 week internship at an uncles investment management firm Murray Asset Management. There I picked my very first investment AG Barr after doing some research, and shortly after opened up my first trading account with Halifax Sharedealing. My interest in investment only grew from there, as I continued trading through my university years.
Stockbroking
After university I landed my first job as a stockbroker at Killik & Co. There I gradually worked my way through all of the requisite exams to become a fully authorised stockbroker. There I worked for 5 years, working my way up from a trainee all the way to managing and advising client investment portfolios on bonds, equities, funds, and alternatives.
A changing industry
I realised during my time as a stockbroker that the business model of stockbroking was breaking down due to technological innovation. In particular the UK stockbroking company Hargreaves Lansdown was capable of setting up a client account in less than 5 minutes and a flat dealing fee of c. £12 - something unseen before then. While HL was an execution-only platform, we were losing clients in droves to the cheaper platform, in particular the clients at the lower end of the net wealth spectrum. I realised my career was at a junction, I could either learn more about this new technological threat to my industry and try to join them, or learn more about the industry of investment first. I chose the latter and sought a job as an investment manager.
Investment Management
I was lucky enough to land a job as an investment manager with Sarasin & Partners. There I started to take the CFA exams and help with my line manager oversee high net worth portfolios. Discretionary management was a complete eye opener for me learning about the new business model, the differing ways asset management can be done, and how much deeper the levels of analytics one could go when managing a portfolio. However again I could see the technological threat continuing to encroach on investment, except now this time it was robo investors such as Nutmeg, Scalable Capital, Money Farm that was threatening the industry. While I had thoroughly enjoyed my 4 years at Sarasin & Partners, I knew the day had come to learn more about this threat to the industry. After much research, I concluded the best way to access the 'startup' FinTech industry would be to become a software engineer. So I attended the General Assemly Web Development Immersive course to learn to be a full-stack software engineer.
General Assembly
I kickstarted my learning in development by attending the General Assembly 3 month Web Development Immersive program. It was a fantastic time in my life, I made great friends, produced some websites I'm proud of, and it significantly accellerated my code understanding and learning.
Startup life
My startup career was intensive and went by fast. In three years I worked for three companies; Captain AI, Drover, and Farmdrop. Each of these companies was at a differing size, with Captain being the smallest at 10 people and pre-seed funded, to Farmdrop with was 80 people and series B funded. At each company I learned something different, both in terms of how the business operates at different scales and their priorities, companied with the job I was actually doing which was software engineering and their differing priorities - i.e. code quality vs. speed of producing working code. These years I spent all of my free time studying software engineering, building websites, and networking in the sector. Having come from a finance background, people in the sector had a very different attitude to life and business that was fascinating to join.
My own venture - Kytra
This journey was not over yet. My interest still very much lies within the financial services sector, and I felt I had learnt enough about startups and software engineering to launch my own startup. As such I joined forces with a previous software engineering colleague of mine Ben Toogood from Captain AI. I spent a considerable amount of time pitching my business idea to him, and educating him on investment and the industry, and why my business idea was required to solve a problem. Essentially the problem I wanted to solve went way back to my Killik & Co days where clients were leaving in their droves to Hargreaves Lansdown:
Investors are taking the decision to manage their own money rather than take professional advice, resulting in poor risk management and volatile returns.
I therefore wanted to try to fix this problem by launching Kytra, and help investors manage their portfolios in a more informative way.
What the future holds?
I have been working on Kytra now for over a year part time, or 2 months full time. It has so far been fun, highly challening, stressful, educational, and mostly rewarding. The business is self funded and so far an expensive endeavour. Most of our time has been spent researching the industry and building the product. Now we have an iOS and Android app, a website landing page, a legally formed company, and a few users trying out our beta app. Next steps are to market it for some signs that the product has traction, and hopefully land an investor.