Kate Craig-Wood: 'I'm lucky, many men would never pass for a woman'

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What makes a potent entrepreneur? As she tells Eleanor Harris, her success in business is in part thanks to a unique experience. Kate Craig-Wood is co-founder and managing director of Memset, based in Guildford. She was born in Surrey in and has a Masters degree in biomedical science.

After graduating, she worked as a web programmer at MBA Systems, then as a management consultant at Arthur Andersen, and then rose from e-commerce developer to head of business development at Easyspace, before founding Memset in kate craig wood bitcoin values Craig-Wood sits kate craig wood bitcoin values the main board of Intellect UK, which represents the UK technology industry, and chairs its climate change group.

She is in the final year of a collaborative PhD in energy-efficient cloud computing at Surrey University, and her hobbies include motorcycling, surfing and science. I was brought up in quite an entrepreneurial household — my dad was a technology entrepreneur, and the dinner table conversation revolved around business and information technology, so I had it in my blood to an extent.

I had a very supportive partner so I was able to go for about two years without paying myself. In the first few years we grew very aggressively. Getting involved in technology at a young age really gave me an advantage and I became quite scientific too, and I brought that systematic and scientific approach to business, which stood me in really good stead. You are also a passionate advocate for green technology and getting girls into technology — is promoting these issues as important to you as your business?

Humanity is a bit of a blight on the planet and anything we can do to reverse that and minimise our impact is worthy, and technology holds the answer I think to most of it.

Getting girls into IT comes back to having a healthy IT industry. Research shows that gender-balanced teams are more effective, so on a purely practical level, to feed that engine of growth, we need more women in technology.

Also, on a more personal level, it can get a bit lonely at the top. Also, I see a number of really good girls who do come into the industry and are put off by how many guys there are and end up leaving, kate craig wood bitcoin values we really need them. As a woman in this male-dominated industry, has your gender been a barrier or an advantage? It was a lot worse when I was very blonde. Some of the guys are just plain sexist, it is quite appalling. I would hazard, however, that in my case, overall, because there are so few women kate craig wood bitcoin values senior IT positions, it has been an advantage.

It has helped me gain visibility for myself and for the company. I would say there is definite positive selection for the few women that are in the IT industry, the up and coming companies recognise that the few female technologists are a precious commodity. You have said that when you were young kate craig wood bitcoin values wanted two things when you grew up: You have achieved significant success in business and you underwent a transsexual transition six years ago — how does it feel to have achieved that two-pronged dream, and would you consider that your greatest achievement?

But yes, I do feel very lucky to be kate craig wood bitcoin values my childhood dream. Do you think your success in business is in part because you are able to see things from both sides of the gender divide? I think I should be viewed as an interesting social experiment in what can happen if you take the female mind but then socialise it as a male, and give it a traditional male upbringing, and I would hazard that you come out with quite a potent entrepreneur.

I hope to become a portfolio entrepreneur, using Memset as a base to bootstrap other synergistic services. Kate Craig-Wood — Memset What makes a potent entrepreneur? Why did you set up Memset? What was the inspiration?

Can kate craig wood bitcoin values tell me about the growth and success of the company? As an entrepreneur, do you have more new business ideas in you? Most read this kate craig wood bitcoin values Solent: Phyllis Kate craig wood bitcoin values to open fitness centre in September Reading: Apartments, tech hub and cinema feature in Thames Quarter development Reading: Employers could face action for telling female staff what to wear.

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I got involved in G-Cloud back in late as their technical architecture co-lead on Phase II of the project. I have been a vocal supporter ever since, even in the face of depressingly slow progress, but today I have finally had enough. The dream is dying. In the spirit of full disclosure I shall explain why I have become so disenchanted.

These investments, while affordable, have stolen investment from other areas of our business. Our growth over the last few years has slowed as a result. Our faith in the G-Cloud dream has caused us to innovate less and create fewer jobs. Nowhere near enough to make it a profitable venture. Perhaps the most galling fact of all is that we have had no new business from G-Cloud since ! I have been asking myself this a lot.

The G-Cloud buying guide makes it clear that cost is supposed to be the main choice point. We have worked hard to keep our prices as low as possible; our specialty is using open source software and generic hardware to provide high-security, low-cost IaaS.

Fundamentally it is just VMs and storage with some bells and whistles around the edge. If that were true our competitors, most notably Skyscape, would not be powering ahead with stunning revenue growth. What about our sales approach? This, I think, is the nub. We have had some success by going to market with partners mostly the business not through G-Cloud.

They want the kudos of working with a techie SME as well as access to our open source and cloud know-how. Until recently we continued to believe the Cabinet Office propaganda that a significant proportion of government was ready to disaggregate the stack and directly consume IaaS. So what has gone wrong?

It does require buyers to change their behaviour in order for the new model to work. The Digital Marketplace is also broken. It is like the bad old days of search engine SEO! The second big problem is that central government completely ignore their own mandates. We are one of only a handful of suppliers offering it on G-Cloud at present, but still no interest.

Reinstating the requirement for feedback and enforcing it would be very helpful to the supplier community. How can we learn and improve if we just get stonewalled? Not only did I have a hand in creating the coolaid but I made us drink it. We passionately believed in the dream of G-Cloud and kept doing so despite the goal posts being repeatedly moved, the marketplace continuing not to function properly and buyers continuing to behave in the same old ways.

We have learned a lot along the way and, thanks to our enhanced security posture, are attracting unexpected business from sectors such as finance and healthcare as well as government business through other routes. Having poured so much of myself into G-Cloud though this is small comfort. My faith is exhausted. What has gone wrong? Great Post from Kate https: Yes we butted out after gcloud4 as we were getting no business so cut our losses and concentrated on training. With over services firms it was a dead loss to get new business.

We are aslo working with government but not through the Digital Marketplace. Our resources are out meeting customers and delivering. Perhaps Memset should establish some awards for Information Systems excellence in local and central government. Your investment though in OpenStack and generic hardware is definitely I believe and others in the OCP community the right way to go to not only to provide a competitive advantage in the Cloud Utility and Colo space but also to be an overall benefit to the environment.

Until government customers learn how to make buying decisions by themselves, the cost of sale to government will always mean that the eventual sale price will be higher than for the private sector. Until they change this mindset, the public sector will never be able to take advantage of the radically lower costs of self-service applications. Meanwhile the taxpayer pays for their laziness. Congratulations Kate for such an open and honest appraisal.

Add the legal issues with G-Cloud, which have never been addressed, and you get where we are. Everybody is making it up as they go along. That includes sufficient for feedback and empirical appraisal of the scheme, and critically to actually change things that are identified as not working. Frameworks and the like have defined ends — why not treat them like a project and resource accordingly?

Kate has been a cheerleader for G-Cloud ever since it started, so the fact that she has finally […]. The dream is dying What are we doing wrong? Ability to compare prices like-with-like: This should be completely possible for VMs and many other commoditised services! I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me. Profile cancel Sign in with Twitter Sign in with Facebook. We gave up on G-Cloud ages ago. Which cryptocoins will survive? Hosted on a Memset dedicated server.