Twenty-five years in the making

As a teenager, I was part of Musical Youth Theatre Company in Bath. It produced shows at the Theatre Royal, performed at national events, and turned out a remarkable number of people who went on to professional careers in The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Hollyoaks, Love Actually, Broadway and West End musicals.

At the time, they were just people sharing a rehearsal room with me. Around the same years, friends in the industry started asking for help getting online - headshots, CVs, contact details, and simple hand-built websites before anyone had a template for this.

I built what would now be recognised as a social network for theatre companies. When Facebook launched in the UK a few years later, more than a few people asked whether I had something to do with it.

I had not. I had just arrived at the same answer, earlier, for a much more specific audience. The idea was right. The timing and infrastructure were not quite there.

In 2001, I became one of the original members of Vocal Works Gospel Choir. Over the next twenty years, we performed for BBC One shows, live on BBC Three, sang alongside Kerry Ellis, Mary Wilson and Nick Mason, recorded at Real World Studios and Maida Vale Studios, released songs for Children in Need, and sang at hundreds of weddings across the UK and Europe.

I was performing on television, in professional studios, at events and concerts throughout the same years I was building web platforms and media infrastructure.

That dual life is not incidental to SceneTribe. It is the foundation of it.

Through the mid-2000s, my focus shifted to video and audio infrastructure for Public TV and Kent TV, broadband television for public broadcasters, and audio platforms for Cambridge Audio and The Economist Audiobooks.

It was not creative industry work exactly, but it was essential preparation for it. This is where I learned how to build things that scale.

Performers Lounge gave actors a dedicated place to build their own professional web presence - their own pages, credits, and contact details.

The instinct was sound. But individual websites are not the same as a connected network. The industry problem is not that performers cannot publish information. It is that the right people cannot find it.

For five years, I sponsored First Light Movies, a BFI initiative giving young people aged five to nineteen the opportunity to write, act, shoot, and produce their own short films.

Over its lifetime, First Light supported more than 20,000 young people across 1,000 film projects. The belief was straightforward: if you have been given an early advantage in the creative world, you pass it on.

Since the early 2010s, I have built and maintained the entire ticketing platform for one of the UK's best-known comedy and live entertainment venues, as well as many festivals and event locations across the UK.

Thousands of shows. Tens of millions in transactions. Over a decade embedded in how creative work moves from performer to audience, from booking to stage. The final piece of the picture.