From Entrepreneur to Startup Advisor — Allister Frost on Being Your Own Boss and the Currency of the Future
What does it mean to pursue a career in STEM?
There are multiple pathways into a STEM career. Allister, an academically high-achiever at school, ultimately didn’t pursue formal qualifications in favour of co-founding his own tech business at 17-years-old. Allister is now an experienced technology advisor: mentoring startups and providing investors with due diligence in areas of AI, Blockchain, AR/VR technologies (often as a CTO). His career to date spans the realms of building PCs, website design, consulting on (financial, government, media and pharmaceutical) logistics; telecoms projects for ‘Bluechips’ (CGI, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Vodafone), as well as sessional lecturing and he doesn’t have a degree…
‘Domesday’ as a Genesis
The term ‘STEM’ didn’t exist when I was at school. I remember ‘LOGO’ (with it’s robotic ‘Turtle’) and the BBC Domesday Project — a digitised information system in the 1980’s used via a BBC Master computer — of which there is a working example at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (www.computinghistory.org.uk). It involved schools sharing ‘personal reflections on life in Britain’ via a ‘community disc’ and ‘national disc’, which even had VR. My mum was involved in the programme rolling it out across libraries and also across schools. My earliest memory of computing was ‘pair programming’ at five-years-old with my dad (he was Head of Science) using ‘BASIC’ on a Sinclair ZX81: he demonstrated how to use the computer and we wrote code for ‘Space Invaders’, whilst I told him what I wanted to see happen. This was the beginning of my path into computing and seems relevant now in regards to developing software, using multimedia and my interest in robotics. I believe that exposure in the 1980’s to these skills and technology led me into software engineering and solutions architecture; extra-curricular subjects can be significantly influential.
‘Old School’ Minecraft
I spent a long time in the late 80’s and 90’s ‘working’ on Commodore Amiga — the rival to Atari ST, which gave you the ability to write your own music using a MIDI synthesiser — I used an open world game called Hunter (similar to Minecraft) and Vista (a fractal landscape generator). This taught me to how to simulate worlds; I think this can lead into VR and AR careers today, if you enjoy visualisations and creative projects. I recall making videos of my simulations and gameplay using a VHS video recorder to edit the story that I wanted to tell. I didn’t have the software available that we have today, like Unity and Unreal; I saw this as me, with my own curriculum, training myself to work with the available technology. Often, teachers back then taught us what they had learnt using their own references from the 60’s and 70’s, which maybe didn’t demonstrate ‘why’ we learnt what we learnt and how it applies in the present context, such as why we store information and how memory works in the here and now. Sometime after this, I won a Microsoft Flight Simulator competition with the Royal Air Cadets and the prize was a new PC, worth a few thousand pounds at the time. I enthusiastically found old joystick components and built my own flight yoke and rudder controls because I have always loved flying, this underpinned my application (in later life) for my Private Pilots Licence
Making an Impact
When I was 17, I co-founded my first company called ‘Impact Computer Services’. We built and repaired computers, setup small business networks and developed websites. After a year, I learnt that businesses aren’t always sustainable, competition from Gateway 2000 and Dell meant PC building wasn’t as profitable: you can be successful by failing and learning from failure. I had that commercial business, when I was offered a place at Portsmouth University but I decided I couldn’t leave my customers and my co-founder, so I learnt how to run a business first-hand instead of taking a degree.
At that time, I also working as an assistant librarian using a McDonnell Douglas mainframe in a room that looked somewhat like it was out of ‘War Games’, which I found fascinating. People would order a book, audio tape or eventually, a CD. We would search for it using an OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) system via a terminal and scan using a barcode scanner; it was my first experience using an online database. Without that experience, I wouldn’t have moved into designing databases for pharmaceutical logistics, financial and telecoms companies. I remember that I was looking at an opportunity to work on the World Wide Web (WWW), which got me into web development and I joined a startup called Lightmaker during its very first days — it was founded in 1998 and they are still going today. My life at this time involved working 6–7 days a week but not 9–5pm, it was more like 12-hour days and a big commitment. However, if I hadn’t put in the effort and hours, I wouldn’t have had the ability to sustain the experience. I subsequently spent 15 years in software consultancy — consulting for ‘Blue-chips’. I’ve only had a few full-time jobs as an employee: at the library, Lightmaker, Article27 and at Microsoft; I learnt quickly that I am more suited at being my own boss.
Knowledge Sharing
The difference between teaching and consultancy is that consultancy involves solving a problem that a person or company approaches you with, whereas teaching provides general information about a topic and why you need to know something. I have provided sessional lecturing at London Southbank University, covering Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a week module for an MSc course. I learnt SOA as a result of designing systems for a career and working on a micropayment platform with Vodafone, which launched in Kenya and is essentially a system to enable you to send money/credit within a country using a mobile phone. This is before Bitcoin. In fact, I remember being given the Satoshi’s Bitcoin Whitepaper to learn about cryptocurrencies. This exchange of value, known as M-Pesa, was about buying ‘airtime tokens’ and transferring tokens but not mining or using a Blockchain (a ledger), which I think ultimately is very power intensive and is probably not sustainable in the current designs. In order to scale with a Blockchain, many tokens require either ‘proof of work’ or ‘proof of stake’, which often means solving a complex maths problem using a computer to prove that the transaction is genuine. This process is slow and anonymous and you can wait hours or even days for a transaction to be completed. It felt good to know that M-Pesa had made a social impact in Kenya and I think it largely solved the civil unrest issues by allowing payments to be sent via a mobile without the risk of travel. Plus, KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) were integral to preventing fraudulent transactions, which has reduced the opportunity for financial crime.
Future Currency
There is more to life than money, everything can be a token at some level. Digital tokens don’t need to have a real-life counterpart and this is going to be the currency of the future — Fiat money, if you will. We are in a decentralised world right now, it is like the ‘Wild West’ with ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) launching. I spend a lot of time supporting start-ups and we have a different way of working now — the economy is changing. The opportunities I have been exposed to have directed my career decisions and I believe that opportunity creates the ambition to do something. Of course, you can create your own opportunities but there needs to be a demand in the first place. Investors look to see that you have learnt from your past mistakes, they want to know you have experienced failure, so don’t be afraid to fail! If you listen and pay attention, you will be able to develop and become successful. How can you to learn to fail? Well, rather than take a traditional gap year, run or join a start-up to experience the world from that perspective and develop skills, knowledge and contacts in the process. Start thinking about your Future CV, rather than focusing on what you have already done, and ask yourself “where would I like to go?”
If you are interested in talking to Allister about your start-up or you aren’t sure about a university route into a STEM career, you can contact him on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/qbain/ and Allister is also happy to hear from established companies that want to discuss innovation.
Oxbridge Inspire delivers innovative STEM education and provides guidance and inspiration to young people wishing to pursue STEM subjects at University and beyond. To find out more about Oxbridge Inspire and the courses and activities we offer, visit our website.
