The Team of Associates
Adelina Chalmers - Founder at The Geek Whisperer's Associates
Key Capabilities:
CXO advisor on matters around: leadership, people management and poor performance
Helped CTOs build and get buy-in for tech strategy
Helped CTOs secure millions of pounds for engineering redesigns and roadmap changes from the C-Suite or board
Helped CTOs and CEO deal with conflict in the C-Suite and with own teams.
Helped CEOs secure millions of pounds in investment
Improved performance and productivity from science/tech senior manager/executive which leads to increased profitability of an average of £1m-£5m
Accelerated engineering performance improvement of 3x-6x.
Paul Butcher - Former Chief Software Architect at Swiftkey
Key capabilities:
Due diligence ahead of investment or M&A, having undergone and carried out both.
Board-level involvement in all aspects of software development, including defining and communicating the technology roadmap, ensuring the architecture and development process deliver against commercial goals, and supporting sales and marketing.
Investor relations, from initial pitch through term sheet negotiation and closure, and ongoing management of the relationship.
Design and development of both B2B and B2C products.
Helen Joyce - Former Head of People at Redgate, VP People at Speechmatics
Key Capabilities:
11 years experience as a HR leader and previously a manager of technical team
Developing people strategy in 4 leadership roles
Building high performing teams including the hiring of 3 CEO’s along with other leadership roles.
Trusted advisor to CEO’s and other senior leaders
Ben Chalmers - Former Director of Client Applications at ExpressVPN and Kape
Key Capabilities:
Analysis and improvement of engineering processes
Lean / Agile Transformation and Remediation
Hiring and assessment of Engineers and Engineering management
Development of client and systems level software products
Engineering, Leadership and Innovation training
Mentors
Jamie Urquhart - Arm Founder
Jamie was a Venture Partner with Pond Venture Partners, investors in early stage companies in the fields of semiconductor, communication, wireless and software. He has a BSc from Bath University in Physics and Physical Electronics and started his career in analogue and digital chip design at Plessey Research (Caswell), who part-funded his degree.
Jamie left Plessey to join Acorn Computers in 1984 to start on the implementation of the ARM processor, later managing the VLSI Design team. Jamie was part of the founding team of ARM Holdings from its inception in November 1990 until November 2002. At ARM he undertook a number of roles, including VP of Sales and Marketing, Chief Operating Officer when the company floated on NASDAQ and the LSE, and latterly Chief Strategy Officer.
After ARM he was an angel investor, before joining Pond Venture Partners as a Venture Partner. He has experience of working with public companies and start-ups in operational and non-executive roles. He chaired the ESCO Steering Group whose report in 2013 led to the formation of the ESCO Council (http://www.esco.org.uk/).
Jamie is a Fellow of the IET and an Honorary Fellow (Entrepreneurship) of the Judge Business School. His current interests are learning MATLAB, Python, uPython, C++ and programming ARM mbed development systems.
April spent the first 25 years of my career as a startup executive, running marketing, product, and sales teams. She led teams at seven successful B2B technology startups. Most of those startups were acquired (DataMirror to IBM, Janna Systems to Siebel Systems, then SAP, Watcom to Sybase via Powersoft, to name a few), and she ran big teams at IBM, Siebel, Sybase, and others. The total of those acquisitions is more than two billion dollars. Across that journey, she positioned, re-positioned, and launched 16 products.
April has a deep curiosity about what makes the difference between a winning product and a loser.
Her book, Obviously Awesome, captures her ideas about positioning and a methodology for doing it that any startup can follow.
It's become a best-seller and popular among entrepreneurs, product, and marketing folk. She studied Engineering in University, and if you had told her then that someday she would be an author, she would have said you were nuts. It turns out her grade 6 English teacher was wrong about the importance of grammar.
She's at the stage of her career where she's trying to give back as much as she can. She is a mentor and advisor to dozens of startups (including to the founder of The Geek Whisperer Associates, Adelina Chalmers). She is an enthusiastic board member at a handful of startups.
She lives in Toronto, Canada. She has kids, a small dog, and a cabin in the woods.