I joined Virgin Net as the 5th employee, in 1995.<\/p>\n
2 weeks later they took the ex-Wired UK \/ Guardian PDU team wholesale, including Tony Ageh (now, in 2006, “Controller – Internet” at the BBC), Danny O’Brien (now EFF) and a rather fantastic bunch of other folks who changed my, and everyone else’s, lives just a little.<\/p>\n
Within a year I’d helped launch Virgin Radio, the Virgin Net ISP, Virgin Atlantic, and was designing the first Virgin Megastores online.<\/p>\n
It’s a long story, but we built up “v-net” to 800,000 subscribers in the UK, “Best consumer ISP” awards, and a “dot-com value” of \u00a31billion (wasn’t everything?).<\/p>\n
We had all the usual channels (music, sport, listings, etc). I played a big part in many, not least creating the Listings service (we had the most accurate data in the UK), and most significantly webcasting V97, V98 and a truckload of other events from Skunk Anansie to Genesis to the Queen, from Branson’s round the world balloon trip to Chelsea FC to Film Premiers. Of course, they got greedy and messed it up like everyone, so most of the “startup team” left, myself included, in 1999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I joined Virgin Net as the 5th employee, in 1995. 2 weeks later they took the ex-Wired UK \/ Guardian PDU team wholesale, including Tony […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfJFK3-J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5000,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/5000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dgen.net\/0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI’ll post a list up here one day… [update: here’s a list<\/a>]<\/p>\n