Being bold enough to stand on the shoulders of giants
Pilgrim Beart shares his journey from Silicon Valley to his Cambridge homeland and gives us his insight into the similarities between the two. He discusses how start-ups can adopt the valley’s culture in order to be diverse, both in forming partnerships and buying into other peoples expertise. This is to ride the scaling wave and not get left behind.
He discusses his journey from R&D engineer, his experiences climbing the ladder and how he gained his bigger picture with AlertMe, which was white-labelled at HIVE by British Gas. He focuses on how the company was nearly crushed by the transition from R&D to service provider, and when scaling the company he was lucky to quickly understand how operations and the process was everything.
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Pilgrim Beart worked at a startup even before University and never looked back. After University he worked at other startups in Oxford and Silicon Valley then returned to Cambridge in 1998 to begin his entrepreneurial career with his first company activeRF. Out of that spun Antenova which shipped billions of antenna systems and then he joined a couple of grads to form Splashpower, a pioneer in wireless charging. In 2006 he teamed-up with Adrian Critchlow (Active Hotels) to form AlertMe which created the platform now known as Hive, shipped millions of connected devices and was sold for $100m to British Gas in 2015. Most-recently Pilgrim co-founded DevicePilot, which helps IoT companies to manage their devices.
Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.
Podcast links:
DevicePilot - a universal cloud-based software service allowing you to easily locate, monitor and manage your connected devices at scale, with proactive management of the entire device lifecycle.
AlertMe - a developer of platforms for running various domestic “smart” devices.