At Ballpark, we think it's more about our entrepreneurs than us. Which is good as we're all entrepreneurs ourselves. Here are some edited highlights from our careers.
If you’d like to approach us with a view to investing in your company, we have developed a method that works for us. Find someone we know and respect, tell them about your company and ask them to recommend that we take a look. It’s that simple.
I’m afraid we won’t look at anything that doesn’t come through a trusted third party - and we know a lot of people, so you’ll be able to track down someone who knows us well.
Helpful Hint: Never, ever suggest to an investor that you’d just like to meet them for a coffee and tell them about your idea. It never works...
Eric Newnham
Eric built up and sold one of the world's largest Out of Home media specialists (billing €4.4 Billion), while managing to remain faithful through the ups, downs and downs of Spurs over the years.
His worst job was a chef at KFC, which could explain why he became an avid Twitcher in later life.
Harry is the young one with the beard. He founded and sold RingRing Media to Amobee in 2008, which he then sold to SingTel in 2012 for $320 million.
After living and working in London and San Francisco, Harry is currently the President of the leading location data technology company Blis as well as a culinary gadget collector...
When not playing cricket on ice and cursing the twist of fate that made him a West Ham supporter, Ollie runs independent network TIPi Group which consists of digital performance agency ROAST, creative agency Kitty and boutique search agency The Market. Prior to this he founded STEAK in 2005, built it into an award winning, global business and sold it to media giant Dentsu a few years later.
Previous roles included being in the founding team at Espotting and Customer Care at British Gas dealing with complaints when an engineer had failed to arrive.
Russell has been described as the "Grandfather of mobile marketing", although he prefers the term "Godfather". In 2006, he was the first employee of mobile ad network, AdMob, which was sold to Google for $750m a few years later.
Most likely to say "The mobile will do to the PC, what the PC did to the mainframe", "exponential" and "No thanks, I'm a vegetarian".
Charles is a successful entrepreneur and investor, based in Australia these days, having launched mobile startups in LATAM, New Zealand, South Africa, Scandinavia and the UK.
He predicts that our children will scoff at us carrying around keys and wallets with "money" and "credit cards" in and would like to be as famous for his casseroles as he is for his business acumen.