Episode 526: The Advisory Board – Episode 5 – Neil Stephenson

So this is to 1996, 1997 when I joined.

Internet's just come along.

Really interesting times.

Everybody had loads of money, loads of reach, loads of everything.

We had no reach, no money, no nothing, and we were based in Middlesbrough.

So it was really hard.

It was like really, really hard.

Hardest thing you can ever do.

So everything we ever achieved was through bloody hard work.

There was just no alternative.

In other words, we weren't well capitalized.

We were always short of cash.

Our competitors were Dixon Stores and people like that, which

was just hard.

If you pick an early stage thing to do in your career, working for a business where the end of the month period run was always a challenge, and where all your competitors were well capitalized and based in London, that was really hard.

Really, really hard.

So

we had to work pretty hard.

For those of the viewers who don't know, what did Onyx

do? So we began as an internet service provider, just providing access, but that was a business that was either going to be narrow and big or was going to broaden out.

And we thought, broaden it out.

So over time, we added IT managed services, data center, cloud computing, cybersecurity, all the sexy things that I had no idea were going to be sexy, but just got dead lucky along the way.

And that turned a really good business into a fabulous business.

We were kind of a 20-year overnight success.

We really were with more dramas and journeys and challenges than you can ever imagine.