Interview with Sean Coutts

Sean Coutts was born in October 1993, in Belgium where his parents had been living and working for a few years.  The family returned to Farnham, Surrey when Sean was three months old.

Sean attended the local primary and secondary schools in Farnham. He says of the experience: “It was a positive experience. The secondary school education that I had at Weydon School in Farnham was top of the line; it was a really good school. I had lots of opportunities there.  I even ended up doing an AS Level slightly early, alongside my GCSEs.  It wasn’t my highest grade, but it was nice to have the opportunity to do a bit more advanced education earlier on.” Sean went on to a sixth form in the neighbouring town of Alton to study for his A Levels in physics, maths and design and technology.

Asked about influences, he says of his choices: “The drive to study tech came from myself.  I’ve always been a massive nerd.  Growing up I was always playing video games, fiddling around on the computer, figuring out how to get things working on the computer on my own.  My dad had previously been a software engineer and went into project management, so I probably picked up a bit of inspiration in that area from him.  Design and technology was definitely a big passion of mine at school.  I ended up being the student rep for the design and technology resistant materials department, and I organised a gallery, in tandem with some of the textile students, to show parents the work they had produced over the year. It was a really fun thing to be a part of.

“I really enjoyed design and when I was originally applying for university, I was looking to do architecture, so, I’ve had a bit of a process of going from that to ending up in computer science.  I wasn’t the strongest artist in the world, so I went down the design and technology route to be able to design and build products.  I always really enjoyed that, and I think that’s something that I’ve brought over into start-ups and building software.”

Sean eventually settled on mechanical engineering at Swansea University, a course which he felt would allow him to combine not only the design but the building of products. He adds: “The course was split between product design at Swansea Metropolitan University with the engineering parts at Swansea University. I saw that I could still do mechanical engineering and get a strong degree that would give me a good foundation in a lot of different things, that still might lead me down a path where I’ll get to design and build things, and make complex systems work as well.”

Having started on his mechanical engineering course at Swansea, Sean switched to material science at the end of his first year, an area where he had the strongest grades and favourite lecturers. The course also included the opportunity to work on 3D printing which lead to his dissertation entitled: ‘Can we re-use and recycle the materials used in perovskite solar cells?’

After university, Sean was accepted on the graduate Civil Service Fast Stream where he was offered a position on the finance programme. While it was not his first choice, he decided to take it and see where it lead. He stared at the Home Office in an accounts production role and was studying for his accountancy exams at the same time.  He says: “I knew going in that it wasn’t necessarily exactly what I wanted to do, but as the grad scheme had options to go along a lot of different pathways, I thought I’d dip my toes in and see how I felt with it.  I very quickly decided that accountancy was not what I wanted to spend my days doing.”

Having had some experience at the end of his university in event management, Sean decided that he would like to explore project management and, in a move to be closer to his girlfriend who was based in Bristol, he accepted a job at Interaction, a construction firm in Bath.

He explains: “I found a project management job in a small office design and build firm. They essentially refitted completely new offices from the bare minimum, designing, building and installing the walls, fixtures, fittings, electricals, the mechanical services and so on.  They also took existing offices, stripped them out and rebuilt new ones for the tenants. It was a construction-based role. It was a company of a lot of people that were a similar age to me.  It was really exciting and really fast-paced. I got a lot of opportunity to learn a lot of things very quickly that I didn’t have any experience with.  I was working on some quite big projects quite early on.”

After just a few months, Sean was promoted to run the aftercare department,   managing the existing clients.

Realising that project management was something he had wanted to go into but wanting to work more in a digital role, Sean decided to enrol for an MSc course at Cardiff university. He says: “It was a conversion course that took students from any background to teach them the basics of computer science and computing.  I did modules in the basics of object-orientated and scripting languages, like Python, and a bit of Java as well.  It was a really good introduction to computer science.  That was the best decision I ever made. Since I started coding, I have absolutely loved it, and I really wish that I had pursued it sooner.”

Asked about the benefits of taking a different route into tech, Sean believes it’s given him a broader background, adding: “The experiences that I’ve got from working in roles outside of software engineering have increased my confidence in speaking to people. When I graduated I was not as comfortable or confident doing public speaking, or chatting to new clients, or any of those more interpersonal skills.  Not that I wasn’t particularly sociable, but working in the real world, working for smaller companies and getting to grips with all areas of business, put me in a really good position to manage both technical aspects, working in teams and working in client-facing situations, which has been really, really helpful working a start-up and pursuing an entrepreneurship role.”

After completing his MSc in computer science, Sean took stock to consider his next steps saying: “One of the drivers of going into tech was that I realised that I really wanted to start my own business and work for myself. Tech seemed like a really accessible way to do that, because you have all the tools there that you can build something of your own, without necessarily a massive investment to begin with.”

His experience at Interaction reinforced his belief that entrepreneurship was for him, adding: “When I was doing the aftercare role I was managing projects from start to finish, doing all my own accountancy and seeing the revenue that was generated from the project, compared to my salary. I wondered why was I doing this for someone else when I could be doing this for myself.  However, money isn’t the main thing that drives me. What I really liked about that role was that I had autonomy, I had  decision-making responsibilities, I was able to do things in the way that I saw fit, which was a nice position. I enjoyed being trusted by my managers to take on that. I really enjoyed that sense of responsibility and being able to go about processes in the way that I felt was best and that made me think that I could do this, I want to do this, I enjoy all of this process. It’s something that gives you a bit more of a creative outlet in work; you can choose the direction, the strategy, and you can focus on what you think is valuable and personal to you, which is a really nice position to be in.”

As his course came to a close, he discovered the Alacrity Foundation which provides a fifteen month entrepreneurship course that helps student entrepreneurs create the next generation of technology companies. The programme is aimed at graduates with a growth mindset and skills in either computer science, STEM subjects, business or graphic design. In addition, they require emotional resilience, a hard work ethic, persistence and the ability to work as part of a close knit team.

This appealed to Sean and he attended Alacrity’s open day in Newport, of which he says: “Everything I heard at the open day was exactly what I wanted to do. It sounded absolutely perfect for me. To be given the opportunity to be funded for fifteen months to explore entrepreneurship and have a go at building a product and a team, was really appealing.”

Sean joined Alacrity’s boot camp, he adds: “You go through the boot camp at the start and you have mentorship throughout the fifteen months. It was a guided process where you have someone there on hand to help you when you get stuck. They’ve got a lot of experience taking other companies through the same route.  So that was something that I valued and trusted.  The other aspect is that you didn’t have to have your own idea.  I’ve got a notebook full of random tech ideas that I’d love to pursue one day, but they offer a partnership.”

Graduates work together as a team. In Sean’s case, his team combined a mix of technical and business graduates. During the boot camp, students learn and follow Alacrity’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship Canvas which Sean describes it as: “a guideline to help us make sure that we’re building something that is going to function, make money and be sustained over time.”

Whilst working on their project, the team is partnered with a strategic partner from either industry or the public sector who has a real life problem that could be solved through existing technology.

Sean says: “There’s a wide range of organisations and sectors, from legal, finance, public sector and charities.  There are all sorts of people and challenges that we get exposed and ideate on whether we can build something around that. The fact that there was someone with a need that we might be able to solve and that we might be able to make their lives easier, really appealed to me. I refer to the Alacrity Foundation as demand-led entrepreneurship; you already know that there’s someone theoretically willing to buy before you start making the product. You’ve got to build the right thing which is a whole challenge on to itself.”

As well as a £1500 monthly stipend during the course, Sean’s venture, Graphium Technologies, has received some pre-seed investment from the Wesley Clover group; the investment arm founded by Terry Matthews. Sean adds: “We work quite a lot with the Wesley Clover team in Wales which is run by Professor Simon Gibson, one of the co-founders of Alacrity.”

Sean’s team was partnered with a research at Innovate UK he explains; “That was someone who was happy to donate their time to aid us in building a project that might help them in their day-to-day tasks. They were focused on researching emerging technologies, evaluating whether they are going to need investment from Innovate UK in order to kind of get them over some of the initial hurdles of getting out of the universities and into the private sector.

“As well as speaking to them, we also got in contact with a number of other teams across Government where there are emerging technology researchers.  A big challenge that they face is that while there are all these teams generating lots of really useful insights around the decisions that they’re making, it can be quite disparate.  So, they’ve often maybe worked on stuff that might be useful for other teams, but if you haven’t already got a contact, it can be quite difficult to find out what information might be out there that might be valuable to you.  That sounded like a really interesting challenge to try and help with.”

Importantly, the team realised that the application had a wider audience and could be of use outside of Government. Sean adds: “Working with a partner from public sector meant that we  needed it to be viable and not reliant on just Government as a customer.  We needed to build something that could be bought within private sector as well and we realised that information silos and knowledge silos are quite a prevalent problem in larger organisations.  We felt that with the advances of machine learning and artificial intelligence becoming more and more accessible for junior developers like ourselves, that the time was right for us to tackle the problem of these knowledge silos by visualising qualitative data.”

The team built a product that takes in documents in a variety of forms, assigns them topics that those documents are based on, and evaluates a relevancy score for how relevant that topic is. From that information, it builds a visual knowledge map. Sean explains: “It’s a bit like a mind map showing all of the documents, their connected topics, how those are connected to other topics, and then the users, or people in different departments, that are also associated with those topics and documents. It enables our users to visually navigate the research landscape that they’ve got in their company. We also expanded the features to allow them to compare it with external knowledge as well.”

Asked if they felt confident at the outset, Sean says: “To be honest, we weren’t that confident to begin with.  Katie is the design lead in our team, and she is able to whip up a wireframe that looks like a real product very easily, which has been a huge benefit for us. So we were getting really good feedback very early on with people saying that it looked like something really valuable and that they could use in their day-to-day.  Our mentors also recognised the value of the product and they believed we could do it and encouraged us to pursue it. There were definitely a lot of struggles.  We did have a bit of a rut for a few months where none of us had ever done any sort of data science or natural language processing, and that was a big learning curve for a lot of us. Experimenting with the different methodologies and the different things that we could try to analyse the text that was coming in was did take us a little while. I don’t think we would have been able to pursue it without the support of Alacrity, because it would have been quite a roadblock.”

The team’s mentors included Mike Doyle, who co-founded Alacrity and was the Technical Director, Adrian Jones, Alacrity’s Director who runs public sector engagement, and Mark Adams, a cyber security expert, who guided the team throughout their project. Sean adds: “Getting feedback from all those people has been really reassuring and has helped drive us forward.”

At the end of the fifteen month Alacrity programme, students are invited to pitch to the Wesley Clover group for investment.  After preparing a business plan and doing their pitch, Sean and his team were awarded £250,000 pre-seed funding to establish Graphium Technologies.

Sean says: “We’ve now had our pre-seed funding and appointed ourselves and the investors as directors. Three of the original founders were in a team from the beginning of the Alacrity Foundation.  I think we were the only team that didn’t have any team changes throughout.  We’ve now just started our hiring process to bring some more developers into the team so that we can keep growing the product and get to market a bit more faster. Most of the candidates we’re looking at are of a similar level to us.  We’re not making any massively experienced hires at the moment.  There is scope for us to maybe make one more senior hire who can help guide the team, but one of our values is to give opportunity to graduate developers. We’ve come out of this scheme that has given us a chance as recent graduates, so that’s something that we want to continue supporting as well.”

Sean estimates that the pre-seed funding will provide an eighteen-month to two-year runway without making any sales. He adds: “But, we are looking likely to make our first sales in the middle of this year.  The aim is that the next stage of funding which will be to fund growth rather than fund runway.”

The founders each have a thirteen per cent stake in the company, Sean adds: “The Alacrity Foundation still has a stake as well, so that hopefully we’ll grow and be acquired, and then some of that money can go back into the foundation and fund a whole new cohort of budding entrepreneurs”.

Asked if acquisition is the aim, Sean says: “I’ve got lofty dreams for the company and the product, but realistically it would be great to build something that’s sustainable enough that a large company can acquire us and make it part of their suite of tools.

“We’ve had quite a few discussions about our values as a company, and the reason we’re all in it is more for the process and the opportunity to do this.  It was something that we’re all passionate about doing, and we want to build a product that is going to provide use to people and make their lives easier day-to-day. There are not many other positions that at our age we would have been able to get all this experience.  So that’s one of the big drivers for us, and going through all these new processes that we’re never had any experience with before has been a really exciting thing to do.”

The Alacrity Foundation aspires to create a global tech company, asked if he thinks it’s a realistic aspiration, Sean highlights the international reach of Alacrity which has centres in Canada, Europe and South America and the success of some of the start-ups emerging from across the centres. He adds: “I think all of the projects have the potential to get there. International reach is something that we focus on as something to aspire to and having the Wesley Clover network behind us is something that gives us a bit of a boost in that area.

“For me personally, what would be one of the best outcomes is it does well enough that we can get acquired, and then have some capital to do the whole thing again by myself; that would be absolutely fantastic. I’d like to be a serial entrepreneur, that’s my personal ambition.  I think my team mates probably share a similar goal as well; this is our first time doing this, but none of us want it to be our last. It’s a really fun and exciting thing to do.  It can be quite stressful, most definitely, it’s not for everyone, but I would recommend it to anyone who’s got even an inkling of passion for entrepreneurship and who maybe one day wants to start their own business. The ownership of something that you’ve done that’s had an impact, is a really fulfilling feeling.”

Asked what is the biggest lesson he’s learned so far, Sean says: “The biggest thing was just learning to get over those initial fears of trying something that might be hard, or attempting something that I have no clue how to do.  Everybody doesn’t know what they’re doing to start with, and you’ve got to start somewhere.  The quicker you begin, the quicker you will feel competent in it going forward. There is still the nervousness and the fear of doing new things, especially when we’re asking can we build that feature and not knowing how I’m going to do it at all at the moment, but having that confidence that we will find a way is something that’s developed quite quickly, that was an initial hurdle to get over.  You’ve got to just try.”

On the importance and value of mentors, Sean says: “You have to learn to realise that they wouldn’t still be mentoring you if they didn’t believe in you, and they wouldn’t be giving you all this praise for no reason. When someone is telling you you’re doing a good job, take it on board and use it to push yourself further.”

Talking about the potential of looking for future funding, Sean says: “There are a few different options for us in terms of funding in the future, but it is likely to be more VC-backed.  Wesley Clover could be one of the potential investors in the future again, if it’s something that they’re passionate about and want to invest in another round, but there’s a number of other parties that we’re just beginning those relationships with now.”

Prior to his course with Alacrity, Sean had little experience of investment however, he says: “I feel a lot more comfortable going pitching now than we had before.  We’ve built up quite a solid network of other potential people who might be interested in investing already.”

During the Alacrity fifteen month course, the graduates learn to pitch to a wide variety of experienced people, Sean adds: “It’s a big focus of the course. It’s quite a trial by fire with pitching our completely undeveloped projects to experts in their field who give us sometimes quite harsh feedback, though it’s always in the manner of helping us to improve. Being able to pitch to people who had been there and done it was a really great experience because you can pitch to friends and family as much as you want, but you’re not going to get the same feedback.”

Asked how the technology they have built will impact society and their clients, Sean explains: “The biggest thing is being able to share knowledge in an easy and accessible way that anyone can understand. It’s a visual format and it enables people to search for documents that might be useful to them across their organisation. They may not necessarily know that those documents exist in the first place.  Users will be able to search by the topic they’re interested in.  You will no longer need to scroll through various folders and files and SharePoint and not getting anywhere. Instead you’ll be able to type in the topic you’re interested in, find the related articles and documents that have been produced by your co-workers and peers, and get in contact with the experts in their field who are already in your organisation, and get their feedback and advice a lot more easily than you currently can.”

He continues: “Google BigQuery is something that large organisations have in place in some aspects, but being able to visually see the information, the quantity of information that’s out there and how it’s related to topics that you might not have realised were connected in the first place, is something that we find provides a really valuable insight.”

Looking to the future, Sean says: “A big thing that’s been a driver for us that I think we’ll start seeing a lot more of is smaller products that are making use of some sort of artificial intelligence or machine learning in a small capacity to automate more decision-making processes.  “While that’s fraught with some ethical decisions and biases being introduced, I think we’re going to see a rise in smaller products that are making use of a computer’s power to make decisions on small scale in products that we use in our day-to-day lives.  There are tons of products that are probably already doing it in the background that we don’t even realise anyway.”

“If anyone is interested in coding, there is a wealth of information that you can use to self-teach a lot of what you need to go into, such as web development and building actual products.  A misconception that I had when I was going into my degree was that I definitely didn’t want to be a web developer, I wanted to build software, but almost all software that we use is on the Web now, that is a software engineer.  So, get learning web development, start building stuff that people can use.

“If you have any spark of entrepreneurship, have a look at programmes like the Alacrity Foundation.  They are out there, they’re not necessarily always that easy to find, but there a number of incubators and schemes that are looking to help people get their first steps into entrepreneurship. If it is something that you are interested in, it’s definitely well worth pursuing. There are steps, people and places that you can go to  for help with that to make sure that it’s something that you can achieve from any background, such as the Alacrity Foundation, it is really, really worthwhile.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley