A serial entrepreneur's journey, from contactless to crowdfunding
Neil Garner's background in technology led him from consulting to building contactless products. On his rocky eight-year journey he zig-zagged between running a company solo to NFC deals with Guinness and Nokia. In this episode, Neil revisits the decisions that took him on this odyssey. When the sector was disrupted by Apple he stepped down, and is now a serial entrepreneur. While he prefers face-to-face investment, he is currently crowdfunding his most recent venture; here he explains why and the crucial lessons to remember when taking this route.
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Neil Garner is a company founder, CEO, CTO, product innovator and board advisor with a long track record of creating & leading teams to deliver innovative new consumer services in the mobile payments, loyalty and marketing space. His latest business is Thyngs; he was co-founder and CEO of WhiteSpace Norwich, and co-founder & chairman of TechVelocity. He founded Proxama, which become a global leader in mobile wallets and mobile proximity marketing, and before that was a board director of Consult Hyperion.
Everything Neil works on has always been guided by a strong belief that the real world and digital world can be better connected via smartphones, with simple, easy to use technologies like NFC enabling mass-market adoption of omni channel commerce through awesome experiences. He is also passionate about the evolution of Norwich, UK, as a tech city and Norfolk, UK, as a wonderful place to live. He has an MEng and DPhil from York University (building AI for speech recognition), and is also a charted engineer.
Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.
Podcast links:
Location Sciences Group PLC (formerly Proxama) - location accuracy & audience services
Thyngs - transforming ordinary objects with contactless technology
TechVelocity - a startup accelerator programme, the first in in Norwich
Consult Hyperion - a specialist digital commerce consultancy