Rich is an independent startup/scale-up consultant and CTO, technology strategy specialist and advisor to venture capital investors and their portfolio. He’s passionate about giving founders access to the expertise and cross-sector experience of other founder/directors, helping them clear their path to growth and bringing their products to market faster and with less friction. He advises many of London’s technology venture funds on the roadmaps and health of the businesses they invest in. He’s also a Principal with Freeman Clarke, a mid-market consulting practise for organisations facing digital transformation, customer experience and systems integration challenges.
Before consulting full-time, Rich was a founding team member of Electric Playbox, fundraising and developing the v1.0 technology for high-street retail group entertainment experiences, followed by Octopus Investments, working on digtal architecture strategy and due diligence for Octopus Ventures. Before that, he spent 9 years as CTO of Corethree, a SaaS and consulting business offering transactional, data and UX solutions in the transport, consumer retail and user interaction space. As part of that role, he worked on customer journey and data analytics strategy for many of the world’s largest transit agencies, and wrote data management white papers for the Department for Transport.
Having worked with IBM, Siemens, Fujitsu, Transport for London and many more, he’s worn many diverse hats for a range of businesses. He has deep experience in commercial roadmap strategy, fundraising support, technology systems and cloud architecture, IoT, UX analytics and customer journey strategy, engineering team management, product ownership and much more. Rich is especially interested in helping startups to reduce friction for their end-users, and all the ways in which a UX-focused product strategy can speed up due diligence, get to market faster and make lives better in the process.