28 GENIUS INTERVIEW Camilla Young
WE’VE GROWN OUR BUSINESS THROUGH PARTNERS – WE SELL THEIR PRODUCT AND THEY SELL OUR SERVICES
get boys who get really interested in computer games and spend all their time playing Call of Duty or FIFA , and that’s how girls see computing. And then it’s girls who get sucked into the social media. One day at Colman’s, like a lot of manufacturing companies in the late 1980s, they brought in Oracle, and a load of Oracle consultants. There was this very flash guy in a gold Porsche that used to come in, and he said to me, “What are you doing in Norwich? You need to get to London and get out there”. So that’s what I did. I got a job in Bracknell – the UK’s Silicon Valley at the time – managing sales promotional information for retailers and supermarkets. It was all to do with multidimensional databases. It was the early days of OLAP – it’s a way of slicing and dicing data. After that, I went to work for a management consultancy in London. After a few years in London, my husband and I moved to Cornwall. There isn’t a lot of tech in Cornwall, but I found a job in Totnes as a software delivery manager, looking after bespoke software projects. They wanted somebody with a bit of London, someone to give their teams a kick. In 2006 I went to work for Twofour Digital, an independent TV company (now owned by ITV). They had a big facility in Plymouth, where I learned video streaming.
Parliament TV, Europol TV, which was a big VOD TV system for the European Parliament. At first there was only one developer and me. But by the time I’d left, they had a team of about 25. It was the real beginning of the streaming times. We were also doing streaming for HBO in central Europe. We put in all the encoding and the infrastructure to do the first radio streaming from the BBC, which was a big project, and was a precursor to the BBC’s iPlayer. FEED: What was that like? You didn’t have a long history of streaming tech to draw on back then. CAMILLA YOUNG: We were learning as we went along, really. One of my first jobs there was to write a proposal for a tender. I read this tender and I hardly understood any of the words in it. I didn’t know what an encoder was. I didn’t know what a CDN was. So there was a huge learning curve, but the thing was we were all learning together. We did some really cool stuff there. I enjoyed getting into streaming and managing the team, and we were building our own OVP (online video platform) product, which was a bit ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the company decided it wanted to concentrate on the traditional broadcast side, and I couldn’t see a long- term career there. James Burt was the CTO at Twofour and is my business partner now. We could see the writing on the wall. After one particularly difficult meeting we said, “Let’s just do it ourselves”. From that moment to being in our own office, in a little business park, was six weeks. It was crazy. We took a few of Twofour’s clients that they didn’t want and started the business basically with about £300 each, which we used to buy some web hosting and business cards, and some bits and pieces. But we knew nothing about starting a business. We had a load of chairs, and desks, and office equipment that Twofour gave us and a beautiful little office kitted out in Plymouth, and we sat there on our first day, in March 2012, saying, “Now what?”.
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FEED: What did you do at Twofour?
CAMILLA YOUNG: My first job was to manage the streaming of European
We knew we wanted to do web streaming for people. We thought we’d do a lot of lower-end webcasting for events.
FEED: How did the business grow from there?
CAMILLA YOUNG: We did a few smaller webcasts for clients but our first big break was a project for France Télévisions, and that was to build their premium VOD portal. James had been at an industry event, and he met this guy outside having a cigarette and it turned out he was looking for solutions for France Télévisions. James and I went over to Paris, presented what we
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